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kim-taehung · 3 years

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revelation - first arrival

byun baekhyun x reader (has a vagina)

smut, established relationship, 2k words

almost getting caught is the fun part. part one of a trilogy that chronicles y/n and baekhyun's growing discovery of the pleasures of...public pleasure.

ft. ceo! baekhyun

warnings: public (semi-public?) sex, fingering

a/n: i'm going straight to hell for this one, and it isn't even that dirty

pt. (ii) pt. (iii)

masterlist

it happens for the first time at an auction. one of those fancy black tie events, where the bidding begins high enough to rent a fully furnished two bedroom and the items would look out of place anywhere other than a museum.

rich people.

but you're anything but present, shifting in your seat, waiting for the event to finish so you can get out of your outrageously expensive heels, when you feel baekhyun's hand on your knee.

it's romantic at first, it truly is. he's had at least a finger on you the entire night, offering a hand to help you out of the limo so you don't trip, warm palm settled on the small of your back as he introduces you to his colleagues, fingers brushing smoothly across your shoulders as he helps you out of your coat so he can hand it over at the coat room, thigh pressed against yours as you two wait in line side by side to get his paddle.

but now, as his fingers trace up the fabric of your dress, just stopping short of mid-thigh, where your knee-length dress has ridden up, you know it's different.

you've only been dating a short while. but you've had sex enough times to know when he's getting restless. and when you had seen his expression as you stepped out of the bathroom in the outfit he had gifted you, given him a twirl as his eyes raked down your body and he slowly bit his lower lip, you knew that it'd be a miracle if you got through the night without that restlessness making an appearance.

all traces of boredom leave your body as his fingers move a couple of millimetres higher.

on stage, the auctioneer is calling out a new item and in the ensuing excitement, you dare to turn your head and look at the man next to you.

leaned back against the chair, his crisp suit across broad shoulders and his gelled back hair cut an imposing figure. elegant fingers curl around the stem of his champagne glass, paddle left forgotten with a derisive sort of carelessness on the satin clothed table. he makes no pretense of engagement, looking absently around with a vague sort of interest at the two bidders who are facing off for a 17th century, gold gilded vase.

but under the table, his pinky finger begins to tap, as if itching to go higher, waiting for your go ahead.

you watch his neck move as he swallows, his eyebrow arched perfectly in an arrogant expression that you know is effective in dissuading all the 'boring, entitled, snobbish assholes' from attempting to engage in mindless conversation with him. (his words.)

his finger is still tapping, and you've gotten entirely too comfortable with the sensation of his large palm sat warm on your lap, but you know there's no way you'll be able to keep your composure if he goes any further.

slowly, gently cupping your hand around his, you move it in the opposite direction in which it was steadily going.

he shows no resistance, easily letting you guide him back to your knee. but once you stop moving, he bends his head toward yours.

far enough to convince any onlookers of innocence, but close enough for you to feel the heat of his body and the whisper of his breath against the shell of your ear, he whispers, even as his palm flexes gently right above your knee, squeezing the flesh of your thigh.

"are you scared of getting caught?"

you feel a shiver run down your spine at his low tone, but what really surprises you is how affected you are by what he says.

surrounding crowd and bright lights be damned, you turn toward him with a shaky smile that doesn't quite reach your eyes. there's challenge in his eyes, and a smirk waiting right behind his conceited façade, you can tell. loathe as you are to admit it, it seals the deal.

with a deep breath, you slowly unwrap your fingers from around his hand, once again facing the front. you're glad for the position of the table you're sat on, wall directly behind the two of you with the stage diagonally in front.

you steal another glance at him out of the corner of your eye, and catch a flash of his insofar hidden cocky smirk that he hides with another sip of champagne.

around you, the bidding has begun for a basquiat.

under the table, his hand has restarted its journey upward.

this time, he takes the hem of your dress with him, the tips of his appendages grazing your rapidly pimpling skin, leaving a freezing fire in their wake.

you've become completely focused on their path and the growing wetness between your legs, that you nearly don't notice when a steward stops right in front of your table.

baekhyun's hand stills, but remains firmly attached, now just a few inches away from the top of your thighs, exhileratingly close to your core.

you clear your throat and offer a small smile to the new arrival, trying not to resent him and rationalising that he's just here to do his job. he moves next to baekhyun and ducks low to whisper, "sir, the item you had requested to be notified about is next. lot 48."

baekhyun nods in thanks, waits until the man walks away, and covers the last stretch of your thigh in the next ten seconds.

you try not to seem hassled as you watch him turn back around, nonchalant as ever even as he fiddles with the bottom of your underwear, just to the side of where you've been steadily needing him more and more.

"baek," you hiss, holding in a gasp as he pulls the bottom elastic band of your underwear before letting it snap back against your skin at the top of your thighs. "you have to bid."

both of you look at the auctioneer finishing up with lot 47, watch as the next item, an 18th century stradivarius violin, is brought in and placed on the stand, wait as he describes the instrument. and the entire time, baekhyun is moving closer and closer to the heat in between your legs.

and right when bidding opens, he ducks towards you once again, drops a chaste kiss against your cheek that could be interpreted as romantic by anybody watching, and whispers, "i only need one hand to make you come."

the next second, his paddle is in the air, and his palm is cupping your pussy through the wet fabric of your underwear.

“mr. byun, opening the bidding,” the auctioneer calls, gavel held in his hand as his eyes rove around the room, proceeding to call out the four others interested in the item in quick succession.

mr. byun, you wrily think, taking a sip of champagne to compose yourself, opening my legs.

his hand is warm against you, but stilled in their position, tip of his middle finger directly atop your clit. you hope nobody is looking at you too closely, because you're sure that with even just a little scrutiny, people will be able to make out the fakeness of your smile and the calculatedly slow measure of your inhales.

with bated breath, you await his next move.

"seven million, ms. hyejin placing her bid at seven million. do i see a seven point five?"

baekhyun's lazy tone as he drawls, "seven point five," diametrically contrasts with the sudden pressure of his middle finger against your clit. he doesn't even move it. just presses, and lets you squirm.

so that's how it's going to be.

you know when to expect the next move now. but it doesn't make it any less frustratingly exciting.

this time, right before he puts his paddle up for nine million, his index finger joins in on the fun. as he speaks, awe-inspiring disinterest in his voice even when he bids enough money to cover the life insurance of ten people, your now swollen clit is pinched.

you can't hold in the squeak slash moan you let out, your legs instinctively clamping on his wrist, not letting it move. at this point, you're so wet that you could probably pour the champagne that you're periodically sipping into your underwear and there'd be no difference.

he doesn't wait for the next bid to execute his subsequent move.

with a soft, barely-there chuckle, as the attention of the room moves to the only other person who hasn't dropped out of the bidding, he begins to stroke your clit.

not the quick, hard and rough rubbing that you need to get off, and you so very badly want to get off now; but little, feather-like strokes up and down that make you shiver in need, even though you can feel a trail of sweat now running down the side of your neck.

through your now glassy eyes, you can faintly make out the skepticism on ms. hyejin's face as she bids nine point five million, knowing that baekhyun's next quote is going to be the last.

just as you debate moving your hips so you can get some more friction from his stroking finger, with the sole purpose of getting off before this ends, he ducks his head toward you, ceasing all coherent thought.

this time, he's closer than he's ever come the entire night, lips brushing against your ear. your soft whine as he suddenly stills his hand is stopped in its tracks as he whispers, "try not to be too obvious when you come. unless you want to get caught."

and just like that, like the sound of the auctioneer banging the gavel on wood is a pistol shooting before the start of a race, he begins to rub.

your eyes very nearly roll into your head; but you're forced to keep on a proud smile as baekhyun nods at the people congratulating him for acquiring the most expensive thing in the catalogue, all the while his finger bringing you closer and closer.

distantly, you're so very glad for the auctioneer and his too loud voice as he calls out the next item, diverting any attention that might have otherwise been on you.

you bury your head in the crook of his neck when your orgasm hits, your thighs clamping shut as you try not to shake too much, tiny whimpers muffled by the material of his suit.

for his part, he does admirably well pretending that he didn't just make his girlfriend come by fingering her under the table at a high-profile auction, while also bidding and acquiring a ten million dollar violin.

all in a day's work.

he works you through the tiny tremors, slowing down his finger before gently pulling his arm out, other hand stroking your hair as you sigh softly and slump against his shoulder.

you can feel the smile on his lips as he kisses you on the forehead, letting you catch your breath, but the moment you make to move, he's speaking in a low growl.

"let's get out of here."

the look in his eyes leaves no doubt as to why he wants to get out of here, and you'd be a fool to say no. the fire he had taken so long to stoke and fan has only dimmed slightly, and a surreptitious look down at his lap confirms that he's just as affected.

adjusting your underwear and pulling your dress down, you take his held out hand.

it's sticky.

he gives you a wicked grin, flashing into startling presence as you feel yourself getting turned on again at the realisation, before he stands up, and helps you out of the chair.

you only stumble slightly, but gather your wits about you as baekhyun leads the way out of the room, skirting the wall and nodding at the steward who opens the door.

his hand flexes around yours, the only indication of his impatience; although, you're pleased to note a slight furrow of his eyebrows that wasn't there previously.

the corridor is deserted, and you half-expect the fucking to happen then and there, but baekhyun is famous man. and famously private. even for your newly adventurous libido, an area this exposed and open is too much too fast.

which is why the two of you end up in the men's room that's tucked away at the end of the corridor.

the look of victory on his face when he looks at you after locking the door sends a thrill down your spine and leaves you, somehow, wetter than earlier.

"there could still be cameras," you warn softly, even as your traitorous arms reach forward, grabbing at the lapels of his suit and helping him shuck it off.

the last thing you hear before his lips crash into yours, your fingers tangling in his hair as he undoes his belt, fire blazing in his eyes, is, "i don't care."

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bixbythemartian · 4 years

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you know, I never can tell when I’m going to release a story and it’s going to do numbers, especially one with a readmore, but the daycare one is doing some numbers

not exactly what I expected publishing a story at like 9 pm on a Tuesday

before I get on with this long ramble, I want to thank everybody who took the time to make a comment on this when they reblogged it, or replied to it. there’s enough that I can’t reasonably respond to them all, but they’ve been universally lovely. for those who this particularly resonated with because you work with young kids: I was thinking of people just like you, and I’m glad this story found you.

I wanted to talk about my writing process on this one, because it was actually kind of interesting. if you’re not interested, just scroll on baby, I’m rambling to myself as much as anything.

this story is like many of the other prompts I’ve written, finished and unfinished- I picked it because I knew how the next bit went. the ones I finish are because I know how the next bit goes until I have said what I wanted to say, which is mostly because I figured out what I wanted to say by the time I’ve said it.

the thing about this one in particular is I wrote it all the way through with a much more traditional narrative style, and then the ending just wasn’t working so I deleted most of it. I’ve heavily edited a lot of them, but I haven’t completely rewritten them in a more experimental (for me) style.

I kept getting bogged down in the details, the transitions between the things I wanted to say and the things I had to say to get to the things I wanted to say, and I was worried that to tell it properly it was going to have to be much longer. so I started over with the bit I was certain came next, those first couple lines.

I wanted to keep the immediacy of the first person present tense that it started with, and tried to think of how she would say that first line ‘my mom has been texting me...’

I realized her voice was low, she was almost murmuring. why is she talking so low?

she has a voice recorder. she’s talking into a voice recorder. she’s in a closet or a bathroom, away from the kids so they don’t hear her.

why does she have one of those?

she uses it to manage forgetfulness, so she has a habit of talking to it when stuff happens she wants to remember later, and over time it’s turned into more of a journal kind of thing.

once I had that, then I had the framing. I didn’t need to write transitions, I could boil the story down to strictly character moments.

what’s that thing about ‘to make an apple pie, you first have to invent the universe’? I think it’s a science related quote, actually, but I’m really feeling it at the moment.

my biggest struggle once I found the framing was how much to describe her voice and crying and such, and I ended up deciding to leave it more vague.

that made more sense for a transcript style, to me, and also left room for your interpretation of her voice, but I was worried leaving it too vague would mean the emotions would not be conveyed as strongly. there’s always a trade off between authorial intention and leaving room for reader interpretation. too much stage direction can ruin things, so can being too vague.

by the reactions I’ve gotten, I hit a sweet spot, but that was the part I was the most worried about.

I cried almost the whole time I wrote the second version, btw. And, to be clear, at this point I’d written the whole story. the substance barely changed between drafts. I already knew the day was saved. I had shed some tears writing the previous version, as well, so if you shed some tears whilst reading it, let it be known that I was fucking waterworks writing it.

here’s some quick fun facts

just thinking about the part where she worries about making sure they don’t eat too much pizza and candy so they’re not sick or hurting when the end comes is still fucking me up

so is the part where she’s reflecting on them having a good day, feeling inadequate, completely unaware of what an amazing thing she has done

the guy who brought the pizza had stolen that car and was joyriding, and encountering Addie changed his life forever, and I may tell that story, too, at some point, if I figure out how the next bit goes

the second draft I actually composed every line vocally and typed as I spoke, the dashes are where *my* voice cracked and I stopped speaking. I’ve never written quite this way before, it was interesting, might try it again.

I deliver pizza until like 2 or 3 am so it’s normal and reasonable for me to still be up at 5 ish am my time, if you are doing the math and are concerned.

I’m mulling over doing an audio version of this post. I kind of want to, but I don’t want to fuck it up.

#28th #October #2020 #October 28th 2020 #readmore #talking about the process and such

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papers4me · 3 years

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In my opinion, the mangaka of Hajime Isayama created this manga to show people the horrors and cruelty of war and human selfishness. Attack on Titan's message is a criticism against war and violence, that's my interpretation of this manga.

Hi. I agree. This is my interpretation as well.

I’ll discuss this from a writer perspective more than an audience/viewer perspective.

I haven’t seen anything in the anime so far that can be pro-war. Everything is anti-war & criticism of human cruelty. you see, the beauty of good story-telling is realizing that those who commit horrible deeds are human, without justifying the horrible deed itself. Meaning, their actions from their perspective is either the correct one or the only one or the last one to do (there is huge difference between the three types). Their perspective is most probably not the best or not right one when viewed from the viewer/audience/reader. But it is the perspective of this character/s. They lack the holistic perspective of the audience & it must create division among audiences because it mimics real life situations in war time when different sections see things differently. (heck! even now with Corona we are very divided among ourselves) Also, their perspective MUST clash with the perspective of the other side in the story (other characters) otherwise... there is NO story/ No war.

All characters are highly traumatized & their judgement is affected by past horrors. This is NOT an excuse for their actions, but it creates brilliant story.

Also the story tackles the “oppressed becoming oppressive” or “the victim committing sth similar to what is done to them if not more horrible”. There is a reason this theme is rarely attempted in fiction & unless you are a well-respected director/writer with oscars in your position, you’ll be chewed & fail if you try it. My professor has always discouraged me from attempting such theme ..” you are too inexperienced for this” , “ try sth that can sell & get your name out there first”, “ play into fan’s/ppl’s expectations & favorite tropes” , “play it safe”... at the end, I’d be creating sth that won’t ever stand out & will drown in the ocean of popular stories.. but those writers who are brave enough don’t play it safe, don’t play into fans services, who finish a character off/ a sub-plot when it is most convenient regardless of the characters’ popularity amongst fans, who tackle ugly topics from different perspectives can actually create sth extraordinary.

people want the victim/oppressed to rise above the injustice committed against them, become way better, achieve happiness, get their stolen rights back, to not become an uglier copy of their attacker. There are victims who do that. yes. Thank God! but there are those who can’t/ don’t. It is true. It is reality that some victims fail & end up in way horrible situations than when they started. In fiction, there are many stories about the former type, but very few abt the later cuz ppl don’t like that. it is frustrating to see/read. But writing abt it creates an amazing chance to criticize the horrors of war. Killing ppl physically & mentally.

If watch a child tragically abused, you’ll cheer for them to win, live, to become a hero!!! if they do, you’ll walk away from the story satisfied feeling “ good always win”. but watch them fail, succumb into the darkness & become a copy of the injustice committed against them, become a monster!!! you’ll walk away from the story disappointed!! angry, feeling robbed of your time, curse even! hate it all... but the feeling of betrayal stays with you.... sending a subliminal message that “ .... creating victims can create heroes or monsters... so... rather than discussing the victim... discuss the injustice itself!! DO NOT LET IT HAPPEN!.. you don’t need to cheer for little heroes or curse little monsters if there were no injustice/darkness creating them. ..... but there will always be injustice created by human.. repeated over & over through history.

often times you can guess the direction the story is heading to from its opening ep, if you miss that, you got the major eps scattered thro season. AOT didn’t trick anyone. it was obvious as the sun in the Sahara that this is a story with darkness emphasized, with No victories simply cuz “ there will always be war/fights even if only 2 ppl remain” or sth like this forgot the actual quote but it is said by either erwin or pixis. In every victory, the story does not celebrate it but instead emphasizes the tragedies behind it. e,g: When Eren plugged the hole in season 1, humanities first victory against titans, what is the next scene? Finding marco dead & lots of pictures of dead soldiers & citizens. When Annie was crystalized, did we celebrate preventing the enemy from escaping? No. we saw citizens die left & right, all just to catch her. When the uprising was happening & historia become queen, did we win? No. Zackery, a military dictator was sitting in her counsel enjoying torturing nobles & his hobby was in no way secret to even erwin.. the list goes on.. this is a story that focuses on the loss more than the gains, in the struggle more than the result. it is not abt winning or losing a war, it is abt “ its horror” created by ppl with different perspective that fail to see eye to eye with the other side.

This is a tough story that most mainstream media & non-aniime / or light anime watchers are used to see in big Hollywood films or Game of Thrones or sth. There are extremely dark anime out there, darker that AOT, but AOT has reached an unprecedented level of exposure especially with social media. ppl talk abt it & warn against it or cheer for it when it is not even finished yet. so, I applaud the writer for not going insane from pressure!!!!!! please Mr. writer, write the story as you first intended because this connects the dots that you have planted early on within the story, don’t give in into the pressure & attempt “ happier outcome, or safer result, or more commercialized solution”. End it as bravely as you started it. Tie together all the themes. Good luck!!!! you’ve got millions of eyes watching you. Some want you to win, others want you to fail & prove them right.. after all, it is all abt perspective.

#anime-only #plz don't comment with spoilers #Non manga reader #attack on titan #Good story telling #different perspectives #dark themes #exhausted paper #shingeki no kyojin

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hongism · 3 years

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hi caly boo its ur 🌊 anon! i finally finished the most brilliant darkness and oh my lawd i’m in spain without the s. to put it shortly: U DID NOT DISAPPOINT BESTIE, and it seems unreal that u and ur mind and this fic even exists bc every moment is just polished to perfection, while simultaneously every character is polished to a sort of imperfect perfection(?). i have so many questions and things to say idek where to start, and tho im not good with words and even worse at deciphering hidden meanings, here are just some of my thoughts that i remember from the story.

hello my dear!!! eee im gonna answer separately since i think i’ll be very long-winded as usual but first of all thank you so much :(( this fic is actually very full of subliminal messages and hidden nuances that are weaved throughout which i think could be quite confusing so i apologize for that! if i had managed my time better, i would have adjusted when i started the fic to account for managing those aspects of the fic but alas i’m terrible at time management and i suck so. anyways.

first of all, ngl halfway into the story i lowkey forgot this was a wooyoung fic bc SANNN and also bc wooyoung appeared like 3 times lol. even after it finishing all that, i still had my doubts as to why this is a wooyoung fic, or more like why is san this significant in a wooyoung fic. im still a bit slow on these pls forgive me and im just curious why u made it like that.

i think yeah the most interesting thing about this fic is the emphasis on san over wooyoung. and when looking over it yeah i could have switched san and wooyoung’s characters and called it a day, but wooyoung really in my mind acts as the integral turning point for decisions made in the story.

the goal with the fic wasn’t really to be hyperfocused on the pairing itself, but rather the emotions and thought processes of each character (aside from wooyoung). wooyoung was kept intentionally mysterious and a bit set apart from the rest of the fic because his role in story was moreso an abstract of hestia, the goddess of the hearth and home. wooyoung’s character appeared in times where y/n was struggling with the thought of home or adjusting to the new changes in her life! wooyoung’s pairing itself was actually intended to be solely platonic at first, but as the story went on i thought having mc develop feelings for him added another turning point in the fic!

moving on, the second biggest question i had is the whole hestia!wooyoung and cafe aurora situation. i did a bit of reading on hestia and only found out that she was the goddess of hearth, which might explain the fireplace and the kind of homey feeling to the cafe. and ‘cafe aurora not really existing to most’ part, which was already hinted at wooyoung randomly disappearing, mc never seeing the cafe before or wooyoung only bringing people he wants into it. i get that him inviting mc must suggest her significance to him, but why was he so adamant about his friends not mentioning him or the cafe to mc before that? wooyoung is quite a mysterious character i think, and given that this fic is supposed to be about him, it’s a bit odd that there’s still so many things left unknown, but its kinda cool that way nonetheless and im guessing u would also like to explain that further outside of the story too.

i think my biggest regret about this fic is the fucking summary.... i wrote that summary well before i even started writing the fic thinking it would go in that direction but it didn’t. and since this fic was for a collab, i left the summary as is because i genuinely cannot for the life of me figure out a better one. but i’m trying to figure out a better one. but i really fucking hate the current summary because it’s not at all what the fic is truly about and i hate it.

however, i don’t hate the fic itself, and the reason why i don’t is because i got to play with both my writing style and how i displayed the story. for this collab we were asked to pick a greek god and one of the seven deadly sins, and i selected hestia and sloth. and initially i had intended to have sloth be represented by the reader’s depression, and wooyoung be a more ‘real’ depiction of hestia. i shifted gears very early on in the fic but what it became is moreso abstract realizations in the characters.

san’s character is meant to be this idea of sloth, and it’s mentioned several times that he doesn’t want to move forward, he wants to go slow, he wants to stop moving so fast through life, and those things point to him being a depiction of sloth

wooyoung’s was harder to encapsulate in a more abstract way but you hit the nail on the head really with the homey feeling of the cafe. beyond that, mc talks about just naturally feeling at ease and comfortable with how things are with wooyoung and being around him, and he takes up this role of being the likeable, warm, cozy, comforting character. it all comes to a head in the last scene where he brings both y/n and san into the cafe.

and again wooyoung’s character is meant to be most mysterious and abstract, but if i had had more time to fully flesh out the fic, i think i would have liked to touch more on him. at the same time however i left it more open-ended and open to interpretation. the significance in him inviting mc in and not being mentioned by the others sooner is twofold. one; the others never really had any reason whatsoever to mention wooyoung. he was a friend outside the circle who never joined in with them when mc was around. i personally in my own friendships don’t mention friends outside the circle by name or anything, just kinda vaguely talking about them unless im certain the people know who this person is. the concept of wooyoung having to invite mc in was more nuanced and vague as well, intentionally so, but that was moreso meant to represent this idea of ‘you can’t make a home somewhere where you aren’t invited’ so y/n couldn’t fully make a home of the place she was in without being invited in and welcomed in, but again that’s something i wish i had more time to fully flesh out.

the hongjoong speech about love (and also the interaction with seonghwa after that) deserves a standing ovation of its own 👏 unfortunately, or not, im not actually going through the emotional turmoil regarding love the same way as hj or mc to be able to fully relate to his words, but the whole ‘if you dont love what u see in the mirror then u dont love it’ mentality really hit me hard, and i’d like to hang onto that when i make decisions in the future haha thank you wise caly! seonghwa and hongjoong’s story is also beautiful, and just like mc said, the more i look at it the more it hurts :’)

the hongjoong speech about love was meant to be something very jaded and specific to his worldview. it actually isn’t wholly how i view love personally, but it was a perfect description to how both he and y/n perceived the love in their own lives. mostly thanks to their own emotional turmoils. the mentality of the mirror quote is something that i think i also struggle with, which is why i included it. it’s hard to do, but even in friendships, i think it’s necessarily to stop and look at the person you were before this relationship and then the person during this relationship. if you don’t love the one you are now, then maybe it’s a sign to reflect and see the bigger picture, so that was a lil reminder to myself and i’m glad it touched you as well!!!

“do you love him, or do you love the idea of being in love with him?” - haha i see what u did there (or maybe i didnt please dont laugh at me if i didnt). its still so good everytime i see it bc i keep finding myself loving just the idea of things time and time again even when this makes total sense to me oof :/

heh yeah again with the more abstract concepts this one was more direct and ‘cliche’ but i fully wanted that cliche in the fic because i thought it suited the situation where mc was constantly struggling with a version of san that she thought she loved vs the version of san she got every time they were together

despite how enlightened she seems to be, mc still made the same choices, and i wanna smack her for it and pat her back at the same time. and maybe also bc of the fact that she feels so differently for the two men that i feel like no ending could really justify her decision, so ending in the vague is probably the best. your ending might kind of allude to someone more than the other already, and tho i still don’t think he’s the best one for her based on just my pov on love, i kinda agree with you. but again, this raises the question of, why a wooyoung fic and not a san fic?

and yeah the whole knife in the chest at the end of it all is that she was still too scared to face the music so to speak. but really i would say she made the same choices up until the conversation on the balcony with san. and you’re absolutely right, the reason i chose the ending the way i did was because either way, there’s no justification. and actually although it might seems like i was alluding to someone specific, san being in the cafe at the very end was moreso to represent that as much as they fought, he still very much loved her and wanted to be loved by her. it was kinda an open casket ending there were no nails in the coffin, the choice between wooyoung and san still stands and an argument could be made for either of them! i think this is a fic that i could see myself revisiting one day with two endings - one for san, and one for wooyoung.

something i didn’t mention earlier about wooyoung’s character being left intentionally mysterious was that he was representing a new and budding love. the honeymoon phase where you’re falling for someone you don’t even really know. you are the reader aren’t meant to really know who wooyoung is because of that beyond what you read about him, so his past and such was left out intentionally to represent that idea of ‘hey wow im in love with a stranger!’ whereas san was this gritty love that’s bad for you. and there are pros and cons to each just as with anything!!

so,,,, why a wooyoung fic and not a san fic? well i picked wooyoung for my collab so he was one of the main focuses of the fic regardless of which direction i took with it. as for why wooyoung wasn’t more forward, i already answered that but !!! i view it as both a wooyoung fic and a san fic. both are highlighted characters with main pairing roles!

i literally just woke up to write this and am going back to sleep ahaha so i apologize if this makes no sense. i somehow felt like i’ve read so much yet so little at the same time, maybe bc there are still so many things i havent fully made sense of, and that’s where i hope you come in and enlighten me. i still stand by my word that this fic deserves so much more recognition despite the lack of explicit smut bc of how much more you’ve explored through character building. love you caly and thank u for working so hard <3 — 🌊

no worries my beloved i hope you go back to sleep and get lots and lots of rest!! and i hope my response helps enlighten the not so clear things as well dgjdklfg but really thank you so much. it was a long fic and hard to get through at times, but as a whole, i’m proud of it and what i created, so thank you for recognizing my efforts and appreciating them 🥺

#🌊 anon #fic; the most brilliant darkness

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schraubd · 3 years

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ACES Wild

Last we encountered the "Alliance for Constructive Ethnic Studies" (ACES), they were pushing fabricated evidence and wild screeds against "critical race theory" in a failed attempt to derail the California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum after it was reformed in accord with tremendous efforts by a range of California Jewish (and non-Jewish) organizations.

Now they're back in action, and this time their target is California's new draft Mathematical Framework. What horrors are contained inside? Let's look!

The first draft of the California Mathematics Framework is out for review, and it includes as a resource "A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction," a guide that labels teaching practices like "addressing mistakes" and "focus on the right answer" as "white supremacy culture."

This is critical race theory.

This is discrimination.

(Is this "critical race theory"? Nope, not going to get sucked into that).

Unfortunately, as was the case in the ESMC debacle, we are given only the thinnest possible citations to the primary sources for the alleged offending content. The link to the CMF draft goes to a website offering a thirteen chapter document, all in separate documents, comprised of hundreds of page, with no indication of where in the morass the "Pathway" document is included. The link to the Pathway itself, for its part, goes to a site that contains five separate documents, again totaling hundreds of pages, with nary a clue as to where this language about "addressing mistakes" might be found. All of this, I suppose, is left as an exercise for the reader.

Well, I may not be a math expert, but I have gotten familiar enough with the strategies of ACES and its friends to know better than to accept what they say on faith. So I went in search of this resource and this language, to see if it is as scary and offensive as they say.

I want to begin with some good news: unlike the Ethnic Studies case, ACES and its allies do not appear to have completely fabricated the inclusion of the putatively offensive material. Congratulations, ACES! This is a big step forward for you as an organization, and you should give yourself a hearty pat on the back.

Alas, if we ask for more than "not fabricated" and stretch all the way out to "not abjectly misleading", things get dimmer.

Start with the CMF draft. From what I can tell, the section they refer to (where the Pathway document is "included as a resource") is on page 44 of chapter two (lines 1010-13). Here, in its totality, is what's included:

Other resources for teaching mathematics with a social justice perspective include... The five strides of Equitable Math.org: https://ift.tt/3qNG3O2

That's it (The website "Equitablemath.org" is titled "A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction"). It is mentioned, unadorned, in the "other resources" conclusion -- and as far as I can tell, nowhere else. Wowzers. I can feel the racial divisiveness cracking up from here.

One thing I'll observe on this is that often times one hears critics of "critical race theory" (or whatever random buzzword they're using today to connote "scary left-wing idea with a vaguely identity-politics kick") say that their problem isn't that the idea is included, but only that its indoctrinated -- it's not one perspective of many, it's the only perspective on offer. This protestation was always rather thin -- the many many bills banning "critical race theory" are decidedly not about ensuring viewpoint diversity -- and one sees just how hollow it is here. The raw, unadorned inclusion of the Equitable Math resource -- as part of a broader whole, not even quoted from directly -- is too much for these people to tolerate. This is not about ideological heterodoxy. This is about censoring ideas, full stop.

But maybe Equitable Math is such an awful or inane document that it would be wrong to include it, even as one resource among many. The way it's described, after all, makes it sound like Equitable Math is a group of hippies saying "2+2 = 4 is the white man's answer, man! Fight the power!" Is that what's happening? Is this a fever dream of post-modernism where nothing is true and everything is permitted?

Once again, I had to dig for myself to figure out where this content was so I could see it in context. The answer appears to be the first document on the site, titled "Dismantling Racism in Mathematics", on pages 65-68. Do they deny that there are such things as "right" answers in math? No: "Of course, most math problems have correct answers," but there are math problems (particularly word problems, but also data analysis) that can be interpreted in different ways that yield different "right" conclusions, and students and teachers should be attentive to that possibility. Do they say one should never "address mistakes"? No again, but mistakes should not simply be called out flatly but rather used as "opportunities for learning" with an emphasis on building on what the student does understand to lead them to recognize what they misapprehend.

I don't teach math, obviously, but there are many occasions where I'll say "such-and-such is the doctrinally correct answer -- but if we look at the problem from this other vantage, doesn't this other position become more plausible?" So when the Equitable Math site suggests, as an alternative to obsessive focus on the one correct answer, classroom activities like " Using a set of data, analyze it in multiple ways to draw different conclusions" -- well, that doesn't seem weird to me. Certainly, as someone who is also trained as a social scientist, I can say confidently that it's quite valuable to anyone who has seen how the same dataset can be deployed by different people with different priors to support different agendas.

Even more than that, the suggestions around "addressing mistakes" resonate with how I try to teach in my classrooms. Sometimes my students say something wrong. When they do so, for the most part I don't say "bzzzt" and move on, instead I try to guide them to the correct answer by having them unpack their own thinking. There's a lot of "I see what you mean by [X], but suppose ..." and ask questions which hone in on the problems or misunderstandings latent in what they're saying. And eventually they get there, hopefully without feeling like they've just been put inside an Iron Maiden for daring speak up.

Admittedly, I've never thought of what I'm doing as "dismantling White supremacy" -- I just viewed it as good pedagogy. But then again, that's kind of what I've always thought when asked about such subjects -- we act as if there's this deep magic to fostering equity and inclusion in the classroom, when really it's employing the basic strategies of being a good teacher, one of which is declining to engage in a measuring contest where you prove you know more than the student does. Obviously I know more than the student does. I don't need to prove anything. So if they say something wrong, I do not gleefully pounce on them for it, I do my best to build on what they do know to get them to a position of right. Is that so outrageous?

Finally, ACES in its tweet identifies one other area of crazy-lefty-craziness in this resource: "the incorporation of 'Ethnomathematics'". What does that mean? They don't say, correctly surmising that fevered imaginations will produce something far worse than anything they might quote. So I'll do the quoting for them (this comes from page 8):

Center Ethnomathematics:

• Recognize the ways that communities of color engage in mathematics and problem solving in their everyday lives.

• Teach that mathematics can help solve problems affecting students’ communities. Model the use of math as a solution to their immediate problems, needs, or desires.

• Identify and challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views.

• Teach the value of math as both an abstract concept and as a useful everyday tool.

• Expose students to examples of people who have used math as resistance. Provide learning opportunities that use math as resistance.

I know, I know -- we're all going to pitch a fit about challenging "capitalist views". But apart from that, this seems ... very normal? We all know, to the point of cliche, that a barrier to getting kids interested in math is that they fail to see how it's useful to them or "in the real world". So they advise that math be taught in a way that resonates with real world experience. And likewise, sometimes, for some people "in the real world", math can feel like an enemy (think "am I just a statistic to you?"). So figure out ways to name that and challenge that. For the most part, "ethnomathematics" just reads as a particular social justice gloss on "being a good teacher", as applied to teaching in diverse communities.

Now perhaps one disagrees with these concepts as pedagogical best practice. I'm not a math teacher, I'm not going to claim direct experience here. But that goes back to the intensity of the backlash -- that these ideas need to be banned, that they are outright dangerous and unacceptable and neo-racism. Can that be right? Surely, these ideas are not so outlandish that we should pitch a fit about their being (deep breath) single elements of an 80 page document which is itself part of a five part series being incorporated as a single "see also" bullet point in the second chapter of a thirteen chapter model state framework. Seriously? That's where we're landing? That's what's going to drive us into a valley of racial division and despair?

It's wild. The people engaged in this obsessive crusade to make Everest size mountains over backyard anthills are nothing short of wild.

via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/39P79OA

#academia #education #math #racism

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equalityfalsegod · 3 years

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Spiritual Spoiled Brats

Bible study time! Just try and follow along this morning if you can. Good luck with this one. I've been trying to render my observations out into this status out over the last several hours. Still unsure if I managed to articulate it properly. LOL

First starting with what I was reading here:

https://www.wildbranch.org/teachings/hebrew-greek-mind/lesson8.html

The above link is very good read, as is the entire series by Brad Scott. You can find the 13 part series at his Wildbranch Ministries website (wildbranch.org), under the heading "Teachings" and the subheading titled "Hebrew vs Greek Mind". It is a very deep dive study into how the origins of the words and meanings as they would have been originally spoken, versus how the Greek way of thinking has, over time, altered the meaning of language through an entirely different way of perceiving meanings of words. (Greek ≠ Abstract / Hebrew ≠Tangible). I would recommend it for anyone who might be interested in seeing how the Greeks/Romans of the time, were able to dominate Hebrew/Judaic culture, along with many, many other cultures in ancient times and conquer them in a way that was ultimately more effective than warfare; which was to change/alter their language, and change the meaning of words to fit their Greek mindset and worldview. The pen is truly mightier than the sword.

This got me thinking about the differences between modern day Christianity and how they generally view scripture, versus how those of us who have drifted away from that mindset view it, and how those differences shape our individual spiritual convictions.

In particular, this quote from the link above by Mr. Brad Scott, in my opinion, gives a good example of one of the differences:

"To the scripturally spiritual man the other world is the reward, not the goal."

So that makes me ask, "okay, is that a Biblical principle? What does he mean by "scripturally spiritual man"? Does the Bible say how we are rewarded and/or what our "goal" is? If so, then why/how would one be rewarded according to the scriptures? What is the difference between having a goal, and getting a reward? Are we all rewarded, and are there different rewards? What do Christians say our reward is (not individual Christians, more, those who are Christian leaders/denominations)?

After answering those questions for myself through searching the scriptures, it brought me first to this general observation. Just my opinion, not directed toward any particular person, denomination, etc...

Conservatives in this country in general roundly object to when children are given rewards without earning it (winning), just because they happened to be present; many consider children who get rewarded without being found worthy of reward as being spoiled. Yet at the same time, the prevalently accepted spiritual belief system in Christianity does exactly that. It claims that you only need to have "belief" of worthiness (ie: accepting Christ in your heart, aka, "grace through faith") in order to reap the rewards. And while, I agree, that those who perhaps have become martyrs and died as a result of professing that belief will certainly be rewarded for that devotion, that in itself is "action/works + faith": ie: "proof" of their belief. Works + Faith. Being slaughtered by someone because you would rather die than denounce your love for Yeshua (Jesus) would be the ultimate "work". However, at least as of now, the majority of Western Christians (not all, but many) have not had their devotion tested to the point of actual martyrdom, and even then, I suspect, many would still be found "lukewarm", based upon their unwillingness to sacrifice personal comforts in order to live according to the "how", the actual instructions that the Scriptures inform us that God himself commanded us to live. Ultimately, God knows our hearts, yes. But are you willing to take the chance that your own heart has been tempted astray by false teachings that might incur His wrath when judgement comes? I know I am not. And I refuse to entrust my own salvation to any pastor, preacher, teacher, organization, institution, religion, tradition, interpretation, culture, practice, or society which thinks it is free to add to or take away a single word of the Scriptures in order to accommodate and excuse their own personal preferences, philosophies, or traditions. God was pretty clear on what he thought of those who preferred traditions of men over the instructions he sat down for us.

Consider our "Participation Trophy" culture of entitlement. Christianity itself is a "Participation Trophy" Religion. "You don't have to "do" anything--- EVERYONE gets salvation!" Suddenly "Jesus" turns into "Oprah", handing out salvation to anyone who simply happens to be in the room at the time, cheering for their own selfish desire, without any other stipulations.

Is that what the Bible actually says though?

I find it ironic that on one hand, Conservatives roundly condemn Liberal thinking based on how all that matters is intention, while at the same time, using the same logic to explain how they are saved based strictly upon grace through faith alone, and entirely leaving out the fruit of the spirit and the works that the FRUIT produces.

But first, let's study out the word "FRUIT" so we can find out what the original intended meaning of what "Fruit" is according to how the ancient Hebrew authors of the Bible, and those who lived at the time it was written would have understood it to mean and what that applied to, so we can better understand how that would have been relevant then, and why I believe it is relevant even until now. The English word "fruit" in Hebrew is spelled "פרי", which is "pry" in modern Hebrew (transliterated), and pronounced "per-ee/pr-ee" in English. (Keep in mind, Hebrew is read from Right to Left, which can be confusing to English readers.) The origin of the modern Hebrew letters, " פרי " starting from the first symbol from right to left, if we break it down into their ancient pictographic Hebrew meanings would be: פ (pey) meaning "mouth", "word", or "speak", ר (resh) means "head of", "beginning of/heart of" and י (yod/yud) means "arm/hand", or "work". So fruit, means what you say and what you do, according to your head (heart).

John 14:15- "If you love me you will obey my commandments". What commandments? How do you obey them if you do not know what they are? Would you be considered obedient to Yah's commandments if you only confess things with words without actions that prove it? In conclusion, I realize this is going to be a very unpopular opinion, nonetheless, I will be totally blunt: Our modern day Judeo/Christian culture has turned us into spiritual spoiled brats.

I myself, have lived most of my life as a spoiled brat, and in many ways am still a spoiled brat. But that is in part, why I am so convicted to pursue righteousness.

Proverbs 21:21

"He who pursues righteousness and loving-commitment Finds life, righteousness and esteem."

Mattithyahu (Matthew) 16:24, 27

24 "Then יהושע said to His taught ones, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his stake, and follow Me."

27 "For the Son of Aḏam is going to come in the esteem of His Father with His messengers, and then He shall reward each according to his works."

Shabbat Shalom, Ya'll!

#HebrewRoots TorahObservant Scriptures WordsMeanThings Christianity #ParticipationTrophyCulture

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weaselandfriends · 5 years

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Hymnstoke XIII

Have you heard the story of bladekindEyewear the Blind?

In infinite folly, this man strapped knives to his eyeballs, depriving himself of sight. Nonetheless he was known as the wisest man in Homestuck Tumblr, with a wicked pack of classpect analyses. As Homestuck progressed through its lengthy sixth act, he developed a wide sleight of theories as to how it would end and what it would mean when it ended that way, focused most famously on each character's SBURB class and aspect (classpect for portmanteau).

When Homestuck ended, and then ended a second time, he turned out to be wrong.

In a recent post, he made this comment about his wrongness:

BlastYoBoots 04/26/2019: part of why all my theories were wrong is that they were arrogant and misguided and just all-around regrettable and I thought I "knew" what Andrew morally wanted out of a story when he wasn't after the same thing at all

I bring this tale to your attention not to drag our Sosostris through the mud. In fact, I'd say he's unduly harsh on himself here. He may indeed have had a decent grasp of Hussie's moral purposes regarding Homestuck—in 2013. It has been a long six years since then, during which Hussie followed in the footsteps of other noted New England authors J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon and vanished off the face of the planet. It would be fair to theorize that what Hussie "wanted" out of Homestuck changed considerably in those years. And the truth is, because Hussie has disappeared so utterly, any illusion of knowing his "moral" goals has completely dissipated. It's not even clear at this point how much of the Epilogues he wrote. What statements can possibly be made about authorial intent outside of baseless conjecture?

Mr. Eyewear had the unfortunate position of writing critical analysis of a work that was not yet finished, a position not often imitated by critics throughout the ages. It's relatively easy to look at a work by a long-dead author and make some grand, sweeping statement that "this is what it means." Because the author is literally dead, Death of the Author becomes much less controversial to apply. Even now, after the dust has settled, a new installment of Homestuck may unexpectedly arrive that obliterates any previous critical insight on what Homestuck "meant." Homestuck is ostensibly over, but the Epilogues left plenty of room for continuation.

Someone who read the previous Hymnstoke installments came to me and said (paraphrased), "Do you really think Hussie knows anything about Gnosticism? It's far more likely he googled it and used a few names here and there to sound smart." Thinking about it, I wouldn't be surprised if this turned out to be his modus operandi for the Pale Fire and Waste Land quotes I wrote so lengthily on in previous Hymnstokes as well. Wouldn't it make so much sense if Hussie googled "Literary quotes about April" and put in the Waste Land quote without ever having read the poem, without understanding its historical or literary context?

Would it matter?

Hussie may or may not be ignorant of literary history, or his own literary moment. In that Stanford interview he flatly denied any knowledge of "post-irony." But the author's ignorance doesn't excuse the work from the world. Homestuck itself is rapidly becoming a historical work, fading from the immediate cultural consciousness. Yet it has left a mark. How many works will be created in the coming years that draw heavy inspiration from Undertale, which itself was heavily inspired by Homestuck? And if we take Homestuck's most explicit inspiration to be Earthbound, what works inspired Earthbound? What works inspired the works that inspired Earthbound?

Whether Hussie knows what DFW stands for or not is inconsequential. Homestuck is not a work in a vacuum, neither the beginning nor the end. Con Air, the Greek Zodiac, Insane Clown Posse—whether the reader knows what those things are doesn't matter within the space of Homestuck, because Homestuck invented new meaning out of them all. Whether Hussie, the author, knew what Gnosticism, post-postmodernism, or Dadaism were—I would argue that is similarly inconsequential. Homestuck repurposed all of those -isms, either knowingly or unknowingly, into something new. It is the act of repurposing that is the most important part, not whatever those things were before.

So bladekindEyewear observed Homestuck through the lenses of knives strapped to his eyes. From that perspective, he conceived of what the facts (the text of Homestuck) "meant." I'll also be looking at Homestuck through a certain lens. Neither lens is the same as Hussie's lens. No lens except Hussie's can be Hussie's lens: that is something the postmodernists realized, that "truth" was fragmentary and differed from person to person. Perhaps even different within each person; the Hussie of 2013 may have a different lens than the Hussie of 2019. Put succinctly: No absolute truth exists.

But Homestuck, I feel, moves beyond the problems proposed by postmodernism. In Homestuck, differing lenses, even completely opposite lenses like "irony" and "sincerity," "science" and "magic," "time" and "space," or "author" and "reader" (as seen in the Epilogues) become blurred, indistinguishable, ultimately reconciled as essentially the same thing. It's that reconciliation that I think is Homestuck's most meaty—or candiey—thematic component.

With that in mind, let's continue.

What is under the rug is much worse than any trap you can imagine.

It is a member of a species that you do not recognize, with a ghastly furred upper lip.

I don't even know who this is. Jeff Foxworthy? I guess I might not be a redneck.

Soon these lugs will learn to show you some respect. You made this town what it is after all. Wasn't nothin' but a bunch of dust and rocks before you got here.

Okay. I was right. I knew it, all along when I was reading the Epilogues I knew something was off. I felt certain, and now it's been confirmed for me.

Homestuck does not use smart apostrophes, while the Epilogues did.

For those not in the know, a smart apostrophe is curved based on the text that comes around it, like so: ’

A regular apostrophe, by comparison, is not curved: '

As you can see in the quoted text, Homestuck proper uses your regular dumb apostrophes. Which is good, because smart apostrophes are the devil. They frequently get slanted the wrong direction and conflict aesthetically with Homestuck's monospaced, geometric Courier font. Yet all throughout the Epilogues, smart apostrophes are used. It drove me insane. I hate those things.

Can't overthink this time stuff.

I guess I should actually talk about the Intermission. Internally, it's pretty straightforward, borrowing liberally from Problem Sleuth. But what exactly is its purpose? Yes, on a purely plot level, elements of the Intermission return in Act 5. Spades Slick remains a character who exists all the way until Collide, although he is one of the unfortunate casualties of Act 6's awful ending and is too dead to get any kind of relevancy redemption in the Epilogues, unlike similarly extraneous Act 6 characters Jane and Jake.

Fundamentally, then, the relevance of the Intermission extends only as far as Cascade, with elements malingering longer but never amounting to anything new. Many things will extend only as far as Cascade, which eventually becomes Homestuck's midpoint. In earlier Hymnstokes, I mentioned a few times that I didn't think I had much to say about Act 5. I said that because, while Act 5 is impressive from a technical standpoint, it's a lot less dense in meaning compared to early Homestuck or Act 6. It functions a lot like a machine with many perfectly-placed parts (or rather, parts that were retroactively made to look perfectly placed, depending on how improvisational you think Hussie wrote) that slot together like a machine, rifle, or clock to create a flawless cascade of storytelling. I'll talk more about this kind of "clockwork storytelling" when I actually get to Act 5, but for now one might consider the entire Intermission to be one of those perfectly-placed pieces, and the Spades Slick storyline culminates in Cascade to slot alongside the other pieces in a satisfying way.

One might also interpret the Intermission as a primer for certain elements that will become important in Homestuck proper, such as the aforementioned "time stuff" that gets its first real exploration here before becoming a convoluted but finely-wrought entanglement in Acts 4 and 5. Toss in vague foreshadowing to Lord English and the Intermission's existence is at least purposeful, regardless of whether one considers it necessary.

But what about structurally? I mentioned in the previous Hymnstoke that the Intermission is similar to Act 5 Act 1 and Act 6 Act 1 in that it dramatically downscales the tension, introduces a slew of new characters, and shakes up the tone of the story. Each of these three parts are nostalgic for "Old Homestuck," the Homestuck that is more like Problem Sleuth, and they feature many text commands and faffery like what you see in Act 1. By juxtaposition, then, each emphasizes how far Homestuck has developed across its run, and the differences only become more striking each successive iteration.

The Intermission is probably the fragmenting point. In Homestuck proper, there are no more kids to introduce. John, Rose, Dave, Jade, for each of them we've cycled through the database-structured INTERESTS and INSTRUMENTS and WEIRD PARENTAL FIGURES. Bit by bit that kind of content will vanish in favor of a new sort of storytelling, and the Intermission is where it becomes obvious that this is happening. Jade's introduction already subverted most of the established tropes, and the Intermission reads like a parody of them, with the Midnight Crew's set of traits being plaintively ridiculous (each keeping a different kind of candy in their backup hat, each having a different kind of smutty material, et cetera). Act 5 Act 1 will also be parodic in its approach to these database traits, but I think in a less effective way, as the differences between the kids and the trolls are less extreme than the differences between the kids and the Midnight Crew. Furthermore, the Intermission really drives the nail into the coffin of Problem Sleuth, severing Homestuck finally from its predecessor. Act 6 Act 1, by comparison, is more of a wistful yearning for Act 1 than any kind of new take—which might itself be meaningful in the grand scheme of things.

Still, it might come in handy down the road. Lord English is supposedly indestructible. He's rumored to be killable only through a number of glitches and exploits in spacetime. The doll may ultimately help you work the system if it comes to that.

This line, along with the way Problem Sleuth ended, was probably the primary driver that led to people expecting a final boss fight with Lord English on par with the one with Mobster Kingpin. Although the Epilogues were a fantastic ending, it's still underwhelming to think about just how poorly-conceived Collide and Act 7 turned out to be. Of course, the Problem Sleuth sort of ending is definitely more of a "clockwork" storytelling style, and Act 6, as has become clear by now, has a much different style.

Dirk, the ultimate inheritor of the clockwork style—he specifically describes storytelling in terms of machines—has as one of his INTERESTS robotics and technology. Lord English, likewise, is surrounded by a clockwork motif. Of course, these characters will eventually become explicitly linked via the method of Lord English's creation. But unlike many other INTERESTS, which turn out to be irrelevant, this machinery fascination ties in to Homestuck's final thematic dichotomy. But more on that when we reach the Epilogues.

29/1000 CLOCKS DESTROYED

I guess we know what side of the dichotomy Spades is on.

This is the same calendar Dirk has in his apartment in Act 6. I remember I once had this theory that the Midnight Crew would be reunited at the end of Homestuck even though the B2 Hegemonic Brute was dead because it would be revealed that Hearts Boxcars was still in Dirk's calendar and would come out riding Dirk's mini Maplehoof.

I don't know why I had this oddly specific theory, and it was probably obvious it wouldn't happen.

And thus ends the intermission, with an eye toward the next bizarre deviation in the storyline (Act 5 Act 1).

It's been awhile since I last read Homestuck. My memory of Act 4 is dodgy, so I might actually stumble upon something new. But as I mentioned earlier, the Intermission is the big, obvious breakpoint between the old, Problem Sleuth style of Homestuck and the new, clockwork style. The database-driven character creation will gradually fall away (minus a parodic revival in Act 5 Act 1) and narrative elements will become more consistently introduced with an eye specifically toward Cascade. For many people, this is when Homestuck starts to "get good," and I think it's because there's something innately satisfying about a finely-crafted machine slotting into place. There is a kind of intrinsic beauty about it, art for art's sake if you will, and that is also what seems to draw Dirk toward it.

But more next time.

#homestuck #hymnstoke

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ginmo · 5 years

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I’ve been sure since I read AFFC/ADWD that Jaime’s getting one of the better endings because House Lannister isn’t gonna be wiped out and both Cersei and Tyrion are now Too Dark To Live. But I’ve seen a lot of people rewatching bring up that awful sept fuck up and consensus is that it renders him irredeemable. The show is gonna have to WORK to avoid a million thinkpieces when he gets both power and a family. I’m not convinced they’ll pull it off.

That scene was gross af, but we’ve since learned that the intent of the scene was not for it to be rape. We also know that canon Jaime is not a rapist. So if the narrative intent was for it to NOT be rape (and ended up being just a really bad fuck up from writers, director, post production) then we can’t blame the non-rapist character for the shitty product. What’s gross is they didn’t realize they filmed a rape scene, so people need to shift their blame from Jaime to the filmmakers. If people are really stuck on Jaime being a rapist even though in canon he isn’t and wasn’t even meant to be on the show, then they’re going to really hate the outcome of this story, because there won’t be anything to revisit Jaime being a rapist in the narrative (such as redemption for that) because he isn’t supposed to be. This is why most of fandom acknowledges that scene was an oops from the production and don’t use it to judge the character.

In other words, since the show was doing a direct adaptation of a consensual canon sex scene from the books, thinking their adaption was also a consensual sex scene, then the narrative itself doesn’t need to, and will not, do anything to have Jaime redeem himself for something he didn’t do, but that the filmmakers stupidly did.

My friend Koops went off on this topic a while back, so I’m going to add a read more where I quote her posts. It’s way more than you asked about, and I already answered the question, but I just really love her rant over the sex scene lol. So for those who want cast, crew, and GRRM quotes, discussion of that D&D video people love to refer to, and a total take down of basically why using that scene against Jaime is completely moronic then here it is:

In response to this D&D video:

I don’t think this video disproves anything. The girl is calling it “rape” but they are not once owning up to it. They’re calling it “this” and insisting that’s something Jaime would do in that moment, but it feels to me like what they were trying to do is avoid getting into a debate about whether it’s rape or not, because they know that can get them into all kinds of trouble. ETA: Also, notice how David rolls his eyes towards the end and the person who captioned the video interpreted it as him rolling his eyes at the girl who asked the question. I don’t think he is at all, that was 5 minutes earlier, talk about a delayed reaction. I think he’s rolling his eyes at KIT stepping in just as David had finished answering with that stupid comment calling it rape and saying how great it is that the show has rape scenes, when David had been so careful in avoiding using that word all along in order not to get into an argument. And they’re emphasizing how hard this was for Lena and so on (despite, IIRC, her always saying it wasn’t intended as rape), just to earn feminist points of “we know how tough this is for women, look at how distraught we all were filming it”.If that had been their intention, they would have followed up on it in subsequent scenes/interactions, which is something the show does with rape scenes (see Sansa). Yet it was never mentioned again and it’s like it never happened. I think D&D sometimes have a bit of a rape-style fetish when it comes to sex scenes because it makes them come across as “edgy”. See the way they wrote the broken tower sex scene in the original pilot script or the way they changed Dany and Drogo’s wedding night. But they refuse to admit it and hide behind nonsense like “this is something the character would do”. They want to see how far they can push it, basically.Even if we want to say they’re admitting to have it intended as rape, saying this is something Jaime would do is absolutely ridiculous since not only he saved Brienne from rape but in the books he even has one of his men executed for TRYING to rape Pia. It’s nothing to do about having a linear redemption arc or not, it’s about WHAT kind of “bad things” the character does and whether it’s consistent with its characterization or not. Rape, for Jaime, is absolutely NOT. Equating that scene to Jaime pushing Bran out of a window is completely insane since the two things are dramatically different in motivation and intention and while Jaime is a complex guy that can do horrible things for his family and for Cersei, he doesn’t do them out of his own selfishness, especially when it comes to sex when he even refuses women throwing himself at him. Not to mention the entire point of Jaime’s “bad deed(s)” is that he has to own up to them and deal with them and their consequences. If you just ignore that sept scene ever happened and never deal with it again then you either think it isn’t a big deal, or it wasn’t a bad deed in the first place. Otherwise it adds absolutely nothing to the character’s arc. It’s like they think that a “complex/not good guy” engages into all sorts of “bad behaviour” just by virtue of being complex/not good, which actually does precisely what they’re claiming they don’t want to do; i.e. making a clear cut distinction between good and bad guys, since they’re equating all possible bad actions as being equal and the same and stemming from the same psychological motivations, which is ridiculous. The bottom line to me always comes to the fact that, unlike most stuff post S5, we have the scene in the books, in written format, and we KNOW it’s not meant to be rape. It’s meant to be the kind of gross, rough, angry sex those two have. To change the intention of the scene just because you feel “that’s something the character would do”, to me is not really caring about really understanding the character’s intentions in the first place, since you have source material and an author you can check with. They simply didn’t care in order to get HBO points.

And for some quotes

I find the idea that we are meant to read into Cersei’s actions after the sept encounter in the books as indicative of a woman who experienced rape, or that George did not come out to straight up say the words “I did not write it as rape” (he would never throw D&D under the bus that way, come on) as evidence that it was indeed intended to be rape all along in the books, even more of twisting oneself into a pretzel than trying to explain away the scene in the show as not rape. Neither D&D nor George have ever shied away from calling rape out for what it is in the show or the books. Why would they suddenly tiptoe around this one particular scene? I think it’s because the issue here is much more nuanced than just filming a rape scene; it’s about the grey lines of consent and it’s about changing something from the books to make it look much worse than it originally was intended to be, for a character they know it will be regarded as very controversial/OOC, which raises all sorts of uncomfortable questions about how far D&D are willing to go for shock value. This is what GRRM has to say on the issue (bolded and underlined for emphasis):

“I think the “butterfly effect” that I have spoken of so often was at work here. In the novels, Jaime is not present at Joffrey’s death, and indeed, Cersei has been fearful that he is dead himself, that she has lost both the son and the father/ lover/ brother. And then suddenly Jaime is there before her. Maimed and changed, but Jaime nonetheless. Though the time and place is wildly inappropriate and Cersei is fearful of discovery, she is as hungry for him as he is for her.The whole dynamic is different in the show, where Jaime has been back for weeks at the least, maybe longer, and he and Cersei have been in each other’s company on numerous occasions, often quarreling.The setting is the same, but neither character is in the same place as in the books, which may be why Dan & David played the sept out differently. But that’s just my surmise; we never discussed this scene, to the best of my recollection.Also, I was writing the scene from Jaime’s POV, so the reader is inside his head, hearing his thoughts. On the TV show, the camera is necessarily external. You don’t know what anyone is thinking or feeling, just what they are saying and doing. If the show had retained some of Cersei’s dialogue from the books, it might have left a somewhat different impression — but that dialogue was very much shaped by the circumstances of the books, delivered by a woman who is seeing her lover again for the first time after a long while apart during which she feared he was dead. I am not sure it would have worked with the new timeline.”

Nothing whatsoever of what GRRM is saying above in explaining how he wrote their sept encounter even remotely hints at the fact that he intended consent to be even a question in his original work. He is not pointing out that he is writing from Jaime’s POV to build a contrast with Cersei’s, he is pointing out that he is writing from Jaime’s POV to build a contrast between the books medium and the camera medium and what each does or does not allow. And he goes further by saying that Cersei’s dialogue from the books might have helped giving a different impression of the scene: i.e. that it was NOT rape. What is happening is George trying to distance himself from D&D’s choice while at the same time being a professional and not bashing their botched adaptation of his work, by explaining why perhaps they might have decided to approach it differently from the way HE wrote the original scene and how maybe some of his material might not have fit because of the timeline.We actually have Cersei’s own POV later in the books, where she reminisces about tons of events from her close and distant past, and not once does she ever think back upon that incident in the sept in a way so as to indicate it was in any way a “traumatic” experience for her, while she does plenty of reflecting back upon her unpleasant sexual experiences with Robert, for example. Meanwhile, Cersei being disgusted with Jaime’s loss of his hand, or the way his looks are changing and his personality is changing, is very much a plot point that she comes back to over and over. “How could I have ever loved such a wretched creature?”, or getting up naked from a bathtub in front of Jaime thinking he still wants her and even taunting him with “Pining what you lost?” and then getting annoyed that Jaime pretty much tells her she’s a fool for thinking that? Hardly dynamics one has with their rapist. And also GRRM also says:

The scene was always intended to be disturbing, but I do regret if it has disturbed people for the wrong reasons.

“It has disturbed people FOR THE WRONG REASONS”, means that he wanted that scene to cause controversy because of how damn gross it all is, them having sex next to the corpse of their incestuous son, not because there was an issue of consent. So, no. The book scene was not intended to have consent be a central point, let alone rape. Yes, something happened in the adaptation to make it come across as significantly more forced, in a way that can very rightfully be interpreted as rape, while at the same time not being intended to be rape for plot point’s sake. But, when it comes to the filming of that scene, this is what the director had to say:

Of course Lena and Nikolaj laughed every time I would say, “You grab her by the hair, and Jack is right there,” or “You come around this way and Jack is right there.“

Yeah. Lena was SO distraught and it was so difficult for her to film that “rape” scene. They was totally totally totally directed to play it as such, and were so serious and affected by it. Give me a break, David. And also:

The consensual part of it was that she wraps her legs around him, and she’s holding on to the table, clearly not to escape but to get some grounding in what’s going on. And also, the other thing that I think is clear before they hit the ground is she starts to make out with him. The big things to us that were so important, and that hopefully were not missed, is that before he rips her undergarment, she’s way into kissing him back. She’s kissing him aplenty.

So there’s two possibilities here: either D&D intended it as rape from the start, but didn’t give clear instructions to the director, and, in turn, Nik and Lena, so that they didn’t set out to shoot it the way D&D intended, or nobody intended it as rape but something was messed up in the editing process (apparently after this scene, they made some changes to the editing process? Not sure how reliable this info is, but maybe someone can dig it out, if they remember). Regardless, what they ended up with is a scene that has some serious, serious issues of consent, and the comments afterwards, trying to downplay the consent in favour of highlighting the context or the way Cersei did give non-verbal consent, only ended up stirring more criticism of the director and actors being rape apologists. So, it doesn’t surprise me if they’ve just given up trying to defend their original intentions, since it only made things worse (and rightfully so), in favour of trying to explain it away the way GRRM did; by trying to make up explanations that the narrative required it and it made sense to be filmed that way.So, to conclude and link everything back to the reason why we are debating this (i.e. “NCW is a misogynist for disliking Dany when Jaime is a rapist and he excuses him”), while I can totally sympathize with a show-only person who watches that scene and sees it as rape, I also think this particular scene is not something we can use in the discourse about Jaime’s character and arc, given that not only there are huge question marks about what was intended with that scene in the first place, not only it is forgotten like it never happened to the point that you could skip it and nothing would change, but we know for a fact that it was NOT what was intended in the original source material by the original author. The one who decides where the characters’ arcs are supposed to go. You cannot say “it doesn’t make sense that Jaime does X and Y in his endgame because he’s a rapist” when that endgame is being decided by someone who never wrote Jaime as a rapist in the first place. All you can say is that D&D messed up big time with that scene because it literally does not line up or fit with anything else that is going on at the time or in the past or in the future when it comes to Jaime.

- Koops (jaimetheexplorer)

#.#..#...#....#.....#sept sex #rape

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yvkkao-blog · 5 years

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A Monster Calls Quotes & Reflection

1) It had been a dream. What else could it have been?

When he’d opened his eyes this morning, the first thing he’d looked at was his window. It had still been there, of course, no damage at all, no gaping hole into the yard. Of course it had. Only a baby would have thought it really happened. Only a baby would believe that a tree – seriously, a tree – had walked down the hill and attacked the house.

2) Harry was the Blond Wonder Child, the teachers’ pet through every year of school. The first pupil with his hand in the air, the fastest player on the soccer field, but for all that, just another kid in Conor’s class.

3) Those friends told a few more, who told a few more, and before the day was half through, it was like a circle had opened around him, a dead area with Conor at the center, surrounded by land mines that everyone was afraid to walk through.

4) “What do you know?” Conor spat. “What do you know about anything?”

I know about you, Conor O’Malley, the monster said.

5) You thought I might be here to help you, the monster said.

Conor stopped.

You thought I might have come to topple your enemies. Slay your dragons.

Conor still didn’t look back. But he didn’t go inside either.

You felt the truth of it when I said that you had called for me, that you were the reason I had come walking. Did you not?

6) Stories are wild creatures, the monster said. When you let them loose, who knows what havoc they might wreak?

7) “Son,” his father said, leaning forward. “Stories don’t always have happy endings.”

This stopped him. Because they didn’t, did they? That’s one thing the monster had definitely taught him. Stories were wild, wild animals and went off in directions you couldn’t expect.

8) …The world changed to gray and emptiness, and Conor knew exactly where he was, exactly what the world had changed into.

He was inside the nightmare.

9) “You be as angry as you need to be,” she said. “Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Not your grandma, not your dad, no one. And if you need to break things, then by God, you break them good and hard.”

10). I did not come to heal her, the monster said. I came to heal you.

11) This was the nightmare. This was the nightmare that woke him up screaming every night. This was it happening, right now, right here.

He was on the cliff edge, bracing himself, holding on to his mother’s hands with all his strength, trying to keep her from being pulled down into the blackness, pulled down by the creature below the cliff.

Who he could see all of now.

The real monster, the one he was properly afraid of, the one he’d expected to see when the yew tree first showed up, the real, nightmare monster, formed of cloud and ash and dark flames, but with real muscle, real strength, real red eyes that glared back at him and flashing teeth that would eat his mother alive. I’ve seen worse, Conor had told the yew tree that first night.

And here was the worse thing.

12) You must tell the truth or you will never leave this nightmare, the monster said, looming dangerously over him now, its voice scarier than Conor had ever heard it. You will be trapped here alone for the rest of your life.

13) “It’s my fault,” Conor said. “I let her go. It’s my fault.”

It is not your fault, the monster said, its voice floating in the air around him like a breeze.

“It is.”

You were merely wishing for the end of pain, the monster said. Your own pain. An end to how it isolated you. It is the most human wish of all.

14) The answer is that it does not matter what you think, the monster said, because your mind will contradict itself a hundred times each day. You wanted her to go at the same time you were desperate for me to save her. Your mind will believe comforting lies while also knowing the painful truths that make those lies necessary. And your mind will punish you for believing both.

This is one of my favorite quotes from A Monster Calls. The monster is telling Conor about the truths, the contradictions, of his mind, and Conor’s mind is punishing him for believing both the truths and the lies. The monster is a lie telling truths, a contradiction, but a good representation of human nature. The truth is a horrible thing, and Conor cannot acknowledge that horror. It is too terrible to contemplate. Therefore, his mind—which knows the truth—is trying to help him survive the process by twisting it into a monstrous creature that, ironically, claims to have the power to save his mother. There is a sense here that while this is Conor’s reality, there are external forces that do not care what he thinks. The rest of the world has its own realities, and they do not coincide with his; hence, it does not matter what he thinks. And his mind is telling him how to cope with his anguish and anger.

15) You do not write your life with words, the monster said. You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do.

Reflection:

The monster is a lie telling truths. What a contradiction in and of itself. I wonder if that sort of thing is part of what makes a novel dark. It is not just the topic, grim though it is, but how the author journeys through the narrative. We are led through the narrative in a third-person limited point of view, and it is fascinating and visceral. As a person who has not suffered any mental or physical trauma, I had to work slowly through the narrative. I had to sit and think about the characters’ actions and to try to work through things while trying to understand things from Conor’s mental stance. To him, the monster is real. But it is also the promise of his mother’s salvation, and it seems to me that that is incredibly symbolic in the sense that the monster looks physically like a frightening monster but he will still engage with it.

Conor does not understand, and yet, he knows the truth—also a kind of contradiction. Much of the novel is Conor living through this constant trauma in his life. He is angry; he is terrified. He feels he has no one. He has to create this monster in his mind to be able to process and to explain why these things are happening: why his mother is dying of cancer, why his grandmother seems indifferent, why his father left, why his peers treat him differently, etc. From the mind of a child, none of that really makes any sense. And so the readers are left trying to experience the events as Conor perceives them. Everyone seems so distant, ineffectual, and/or traitorous. The nightmare is his reality and surrounds him like a shroud. He lashes out, and we have to try to understand his feelings and that he needs such an outlet. The monster is him, but it is also the truth that he knows but cannot acknowledge. It reminds me of Pan’s Labyrinth. One could interpret that it is a supernatural story (my preference), but my Film History teacher suggested that one could also interpret it as a child in horrible circumstances and the only way she (and others) can survive in this environment is to create stories to live.

Conor has no way to deal with this terrible situation. The adults cannot help him because they cannot understand things from his child viewpoint. In a sense, it seems a coming-of-age story—that moment when his grandmother and he come to an understanding and finally acknowledge the truth they both know. Things become clear to him and, thus, to the reader. Throughout the novel, he feels ostracized, such as when he feels pitied by his teachers and bullied by his peers, abandoned by those he thought cared for him. These are his feelings, his truths, as the monster says. Who is to say what’s real and what’s not? To Conor, the monster is real. It represents his truth. His family seems to be trying to protect him, but he does not feel protected. His mother is still sick and dying, and he knows it, even when they try to send him away or avoid talking about what is going on with her treatments. I’ve learned a lot from reading this novel. It is heartbreaking but deliberate, and I think that is a hard combination. We can understand the rhetorical decisions behind things, but it is difficult to communicate those to the audience. I think it is the mark of a good writer to be able to create such a work of composition that accomplishes the goals of the author. We can be detached when we discuss the creative process, but it is hard to remain clinical when thrust into a situation, much the way Conor is, and it is remarkable that the book throws the reader into that mindset.

I will have another post on this later, but these kinds of narratives are the kind that I find inspirational. I feel enthralled with the stories, the work, the emotion, the research, and more that went into creating them and experiencing them. It makes me want to write and to reflect and to be better than before.

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annathewitch · 7 years

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Falling, Ch 1: Physician’s Advice

Summary: Bones x Reader. Bones has been unbearably moody for a couple of days and you are sent to try and find out why.

Word Count: 2500

Warnings: Swearing, mild parental angst

A/N: This started as a ‘five times…’ idea for a Bones and Reader developing relationship, but got a bit longer than I intended. So this is part 1 of 6. I have not written for a long time, and this is my first reader insert. Be gentle!

“That man is impossible!” Christine Chapel declared as she stalked out of the CMO’s office and the door swooshed shut behind her. “Stubborn as a damned mule and twice as ornery! I swear I am this close to inflicting some kind of untraceable bodily harm on him!” Christine leaned in towards you gesturing with her thumb and forefinger a mere half inch apart. “Untraceable except for the fact that you just told the whole medbay. I think, technically, that counts as pre-meditation.” You pulled a chair out at the nurse’s station and encouraged Christine to sit down. “What did he do now?” “There’s a whole damn list, but the cherry on the fucking top was him telling Nurse Edouwu he is, and I quote, ‘a damned incompetent jackass who couldn’t tell a protoplaser from a petri dish’ and then yelling at me to ‘get my goddamn nurses under proper supervision before they fucking kill someone!’ I am the best damned nurse in the Fleet, and I did not sign up to put up with his shit.” The Head Nurse slammed her padd down on the desk with enough force to make you wince. Doctor McCoy had a reputation for being a hard taskmaster, and for general grumpiness, but his behaviour over the last couple of days had been out of character even for him. His usual serious demeanour was now downright murderous. Nothing was done fast enough, or to his impossibly high standards. Nurse Edouwu was not the first of the medbay staff to feel his wrath, and everyone had been treading on eggshells waiting for the next explosion. If any further proof of how bad things were was needed, it was sitting slumped over the station in front of you. Christine Chapel, normally a beacon of competence and serenity, bringing order to chaos, and hitherto a McCoy-wrangler extraordinaire had used the f-word. Twice. You perched on the desk next to her, eyeing her with concern.

“This is way beyond the boss’s usual grousing,” you observed. “The crew know it too. Ensign Matthews, you know, the big guy from security, practically begged me to fix him up without calling the doctor. He single-handedly took down four Sindarian rebels on that away mission last month, and he was terrified of McCoy. Did you ask what’s got his tricorder in a tangle?” Christine snorted. “Didn’t exactly get the chance. He was too busy tearing me a new one.” This was bad. Chapel and McCoy were usually a well oiled machine. The nurse looked up at you speculatively, “You know, maybe you should try talking to him.” “I value my current state of existence too much,” you laughed. “I’m not joking Y/N,” Chapel sighed running her hands through her usually immaculate blonde bob. “I’m at the end of my tether - contemplating criminal actions, remember? The Captain’s not back for another two days or I’d be begging him instead. You seem to have a way of getting patients to open up to you, and so far you’re practically the only nurse to have avoided being in the eye of the shitstorm. You must be doing something right.” “I have an uncanny ability to know when to duck and cover,” you deadpanned. “Yeah. Well think about it, please! I’m going on my break, can you at least hold the fort here? Maybe the urge to stab his annoying ass with a hypo of sonambutril will have dissipated by the time I get back.”

“Sure thing Chris.” Chapel hauled herself out of her chair and beat a hasty retreat, leaving you alone at the nurse’s station. The rest of Alpha shift seemed sensibly to have found things to occupy themselves in the lab or the stores. Getting up from your perch you crossed medbay to listen at McCoy’s office door. There was no discernible sound from within the lair of the dragon; perhaps having dispatched his most recent prey his anger was sated for the time being. Christine was right though, the current situation was untenable and something needed to be said. As one of the newest medical staff you weren’t quite sure you merited her confidence, McCoy had hardly discussed anything other than work with you barring the most fleeting mentions of family or shipwide gossip. He didn’t give much away. But you knew you were good at your job and he would have no reason to find fault with you for talking to him. Except for calling out your superior officer for being an asshole. You tried to tune out the annoying voice in your head, there was nothing wrong with offering a sympathetic ear. Nobody was going to be calling anyone out, despite the level of assholery reaching Defcon 1. In the spirit of peace and reconciliation, you decided that a gesture of goodwill was probably necessary and replicated up the biggest strongest black coffee possible in McCoy’s favourite ‘My Daddy is the best space doctor’ mug. It had clearly been personalised by a much younger Joanna, who had painted a little stick man with a blue shirt, a shock of brown hair and a disproportionately large stethoscope, and signed it with a handprint. It had always amused you that the stick McCoy wasn’t wearing any pants. Summoning up your courage you knocked on the doctor’s office door and waited to be admitted to the belly of the beast. Something was barked from within and you took it as a sign to enter. McCoy was sat behind his desk, elbows resting on the glass top and head in his hands. He was surrounded by piles of padds, interspersed with empty coffee mugs. A plate with a half eaten and unidentifiable sandwich teetered precariously on the edge of the surface. He appeared to be studying one padd in front of him with particular intensity. “Dammit Chapel what do you want now? I said my decision was final, and what part of do not interrupt me do you not understand?” the doctor snapped without looking up. “Um, sorry sir but Chapel went on her break after your…er…meeting. It’s nearly the start of Beta shift and I thought maybe you could use a coffee?” You hung back in the open doorway so as not to appear threatening, and offered the mug out to McCoy. At the sound of your unexpected voice, he looked up. He had clearly been brooding about something. Frown lines seemed etched across his forehead and his normally precisely parted hair was sticking up in all directions. He looked surprisingly like stick McCoy. Except with pants. He regarded you suspiciously for a moment. You were glad he couldn’t tell you were thinking about him sitting behind his desk with no pants on. “Either come in or go away Y/L/N. Stop loitering in the door,” he bit out. “Did Chapel send you in as her damn spy?” You fought the urge to turn around and leave him to stew. “No. I was trying to be nice. It’s a somewhat underrated quality.” You arched your eyebrow at McCoy, approaching his desk to set the mug down. He sniffed at it and grunted something that you chose to interpret as thanks. “Besides, I think Christine is way beyond spying. You would do better to ask if she’d poisoned your coffee.” He scowled, jabbing a finger in your direction. “I don’t need niceness, I’m too damn busy doing my job to worry about treading on a few toes. And I don’t need to be lectured by one of my junior nursing staff. I simply expect all of you to do your damned jobs too. If anyone has difficulty with that concept, they can get the hell out of my medbay! Is that a problem Nurse Y/L/N?”

McCoy sat back in his chair and watched you as you digested his words, an unreadable expression on your face. Was being left the hell alone to contemplate his own inadequacies too much to ask? To his surprise you pulled out the chair opposite him and sat down with a sigh. “Well, if you don’t need niceness, I won’t sugar coat this Doctor McCoy. No, I don’t have a problem with doing my job or being expected to do it to a high standard, that’s only fair. And, even if you have a questionable bedside manner and are terrible at being diplomatic, you’re a good doctor and usually fair. But, scaring patients, expecting the impossible from staff and making them cry when they don’t achieve it, bellowing unreasonable orders? Whatever is going on with you, frankly, right now you’re just behaving like an ass. Sir,” you added as an afterthought. So much for not calling him out. You might as well have lobbed a pulse grenade into his office. McCoy was staring, speechless, eyebrows raised at an impossible angle. Hell, he’d been surprised anyone had the nerve to interrupt him for anything less than a breakout of Teenaxian plague. But for you, the newest member of his staff, to swan in with your coffee and your sass and coolly point out the deficiencies in his conduct like he was some misbehaving toddler, well, he just couldn’t find the words. Any words. Finding himself in this unfamiliar position he emitted an indecipherable growling sound and picked up the cup of coffee. Taking a long sip, he tried to buy some time to formulate a response. He should write you up for insubordination. But dammit if his conscience wasn't sitting pretty as you please in a pristine nurse’s uniform just over the desk. One corner of his mouth twitched in a fleeting half smile at the absurdity of it. You had a point. It was not that McCoy was completely oblivious to the effects of his black mood, but he was worried and distracted and he hadn’t been able to bring himself to care. Now he felt like twice the failure. The thick silence between you drew on and you fidgeted uneasily in your chair. As he scrutinised you McCoy’s expression had shifted from shock, through something you couldn’t place and finally settled into a frown. He glared at the mug in his hands. “Have you ever had your heart broken Y/L/N?” Well that was not the response you had expected. “Uh… I guess so. I mean yeah?” Shit. Had he been dumped? How the hell were you supposed to counsel your superior officer about his love life? “Is that what all this is about…sir?” Your voice squeaked a little and you felt your cheeks heat. The Doctor’s eyes flicked up and met yours in confusion. “What?” His face flamed as he realised the conclusion you had drawn, “Hell, no! I’m not mooning over some damn woman!” You should have realised that. From what you had seen, McCoy never seemed to be away from the medbay for long enough to pursue any kind of romantic attachment, and on the occasions you had crossed paths in the rec rooms he was invariably with the Captain and Commander Spock. McCoy regarded you, trying to decide whether to continue with this mortifying conversation. Eventually he sighed, shutting himself in his office hadn’t helped. He indicated to the padd in front of him, pushing it in your direction. “It’s Joanna. She sent me a message two days ago to tell me she broke up with her first boyfriend. I’ve spent the last two days trying to work out what the hell to write back to make it better. My baby girl is hurting and I’m halfway across the damn galaxy. I can’t do a damn thing. I’m goddamn useless Y/F/N.” You glanced over the comm from Joanna. The poor kid was heartbroken. It appeared that the boy in question had moved on to one of the popular girls at school and had told Joanna she was too weird for being obsessed with science. The boy was clearly an immature little jerk, but his actions had obviously knocked her confidence. McCoy had picked up the mug and was staring at it again.

“Jo made me this the first Christmas after the divorce. She was so excited to see me and so proud of her present.” He placed his hand over the much smaller painted handprint. “Now it seems like five minutes have passed, she’s all grown up and I missed it Y/F/N, I missed everything important and now I don’t know what she needs. Her mother is right, I’m a damn pathetic excuse for a father.” His voice was gruff with emotion. Running his hands through his hair and grasping the back of his neck, McCoy slumped back in his chair. Embarrassed, he avoided your gaze, his tired hazel eyes steadfastly regarding his lap. For some reason he didn’t want to see the look of disappointment as you realised he was an abject failure. “Doctor…” He braced himself for another dose of your honesty. “I… I’m not a parent, so maybe I’m not the best person to give you advice… but I just think maybe Joanna just needs to know that you think she is perfect the way she is. If I could, I’d tell her it really sucks right now, and it’s going to take a little patience, but there’s someone out there who thinks that female scientists rock.” “If I was dirtside, this would be simple. I’d kick his ass into next Sunday,” McCoy grumbled. “What, you mean you’d be the scary, overprotective father? No way, I’d never have guessed,” you laughed. “I guess it doesn’t hurt to tell her you think the kid is a dumbass too.” “Think she’ll believe me if I tell her all boys are dumbasses and she should ignore them until she’s twenty five?” He pulled the padd back towards him, “But seriously, You really think that’s all she needs?” “Its a start.” You shrugged. “You know, I wish someone had told me that I was perfect when I was her age. It took me a long time to understand that I didn’t have to be anyone but myself, and that if someone really loved me they would accept me and all my many faults.” You smiled wryly at McCoy and the corners of his mouth turned up slightly in return. “I guess I have a message to write then.” “I’ll leave you to it.” You got to your feet and started picking up the dirty crockery from the desk. McCoy reached out and stopped your hand with his. He looked up at you seriously.

“I really fucked up the past couple of days, didn’t I?” “Yup.” He winced. While you understood now why he had been unbearable, it still didn’t make it right. “Chapel is never going to forgive me, is she?” “Im not going to lie, sir, it’s pretty bad. She said fuck. Twice.” McCoy groaned. “I don’t think it’s irretrievable, but it’s going to take some grovelling. You could start by doing all the overdue paperwork.” You gestured to the piles of padds. “It seems I haven’t been doing either the CMO thing or the parenting thing very well lately,” he said regretfully. You squeezed his hand. “If it helps, I don’t know many teenage girls who would want to talk to their daddy about this kind of stuff. It must be hard, being so far away, but I reckon you must be doing something right. And the other stuff… Your team respect you, usually. We’d cut you some slack if you’d let us.” McCoy nodded, unable for the second time that day to speak. And if you noticed that his eyes were a little teary, well he was exhausted dammit. He watched you pick up the last of the mugs, and wondered just how you had managed to make him forget his insecurities. Even if it was just for a little while, he felt lighter, as though he was capable of dealing with whatever the universe threw at him next. You moved to open the door. “I’ll see you’re not disturbed unless there’s an outbreak of Teenaxian plague, Doctor.” Backlit by the harsh light of medbay, it appeared to McCoy that you gave out an aura of light. Somehow the illusion made him feel like he was really seeing you for the first time and he found himself holding a breath. Beautiful. “Y/F/N?” You looked back at him from the doorway, a small smile playing on your lips. Something swooped in his stomach. “Darlin’ any guy who didn’t tell you you were perfect the way you are, he's a dumbass.”

#leonard mccoy #bones mccoy #star trek reader insert #leonard mccoy x reader #bones x reader

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spilledreality · 4 years

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False dichotomies: Toward “Meaning compatibilism”

From a recent conversation with ADJ:

Suspended Reason Re: intentionalist, I like the quote about meaning as empirical intent, but why don't we just call that "intended meaning," and say that in trying to find out an intended meaning, readers come to a "reader meaning" that differs? Why contest the concept of "meaning" as a monolith?

A. D. J. For Knapp & Michaels, meaning is synonymous with authorial intention (as opposed to de Man, who assigns meaning to how readers receive the text). So for K&M, there can't be "reader meaning." Readers either figure out what authors meant, or they don't (or they grasp some of it). ...I should add that the current landscape of English departments might be something like 95% some form of poststructuralism, 5% intentionalism? (Inasmuch as people in said departments think/care about these things.) Michaels calls intentionalism "the Dark Side" :)

Suspended Reason Ok, ok, but isn't the point of Star Wars that the dark & light exist as part of the same flowing force? That they balance each other? I guess what I'm asking is: there seems to be such a thing as a reader interpretation, and such thing as an intended author meaning. Why fight over which should be called the text's "Meaning" instead of just calling them different things, and acknowledging they're both important parts of the full literary process?

A. D. J.The way I understand this question is, why are there three different positions—structuralism, poststructuralism, intentionalism—instead of there being instead a single position, which locates meaning in all three places (text, reader, author)?

Suspended Reason Yes, I think that's a fair rewording. I don't necessarily think structuralism ("in language") oughta get its due, since it seems unclear whether its fair to attribute "meaning" to language itself rather than speakers/interpreters, but broadly, yes—why not reconcile the positions?

A. D. J. I'm sure people have tried to reconcile the positions in various ways. If so, though, I know less about that. That said, I'm not sure a true reconciliation is possible. A central tenet of structuralism was that texts had singular meanings. Intentionalists believe that, too. Poststructuralists, tho, believe texts don't (can't) have fixed, singular meanings. It seems one has to choose between those positions—single meaning or multiple meanings. What's more, the poststructualist position tends to decay into texts having not just multiple meanings, but infinite meanings. Which is to say that the poststructuralist position tends to decay into texts being meaningless. (Thinking that a text means anything is a fantasy.) Some theorists (e.g., Stanley Fish, Barbara Herrnstein-Smith) have tried to put a break on that "drift," but without much success. So in some ways, the choice is between texts having a singular meaning, or no meaning whatsoever.

While ADJ’sA. D. J. descriptions of the various positions are all well-elucidated, we are still left wondering: what is the actual subject of their disagreement? Explicitly, the debate appears to be: What is textual meaning? Is it the reader's interpretation, the author's intent, or contained in the structure of the language? Implicitly, the debate is over which stages of the literary process (from production to reception) ought to be granted scholarly authority & attention.

We can say a few things fairly definitely: that readers have interpretations and that authors have intents. Though each side minimizes the role of interpretation and intent, respectively, in their picture of the literary process, neither would flat-out deny the existence of intent or interpretation—only whether it constitutes the text's "meaning" or not. Thus we are left with what appears to be, at least explicitly, a verbal dispute. (The implicit question of where to direct attention and study is an important one, and not merely verbal, but the answer is more nuanced than "always to interpretation" or "always to intention"—as usual, it depends what you're trying to ascertain with respect to the text or society; there is no “authority” absent our granting it, and our granting must be goal-driven.)

It is also clear that readers' interpretations are informed and guided by the structure of the language, and that they are also frequently "up to" the business of guessing author intent. (This is the dynamic that allows one side—intentionalism—to claim that this intent is "authoritative" and reader interpretations are "not" the meaning but its approximations or corruptions.) Thus we are left with a picture of factions not just warring over the "land" of the concept handle "meaning," but of each side’s preferred sense having a dynamic interrelation with the other—that all parts of the process of constructing and interpreting texts are bound up as the same process. An author writes with an understanding of how he will be interpreted in mind; he constantly defers to a model of a reader, which may be proxied by his own private sense of the language or else some structure "in" the language itself, however misleading that frame may be. A reader reads with an understanding that the author understands how the reader might interpret it; there is recursion here, in the mutual modeling. The readers look for clues as to a readers intent just as the author crafts them with respect to how they will be interpreted. This negotiation is the same negotiation as in daily language; it is not particular to literary texts, though of course the level of deliberation (by speaker) and deciphering (by receiver) is much higher. "Meaning" is and has always been a polysemous term; there is no "essence" to it, there are many senses, related by impossible to reduce. And any side which “narrows” the whole to its preferred carving is only impoverishing our total picture.

Thus, what we need is hermeneutic compatibilism, between intention and interpretation. A. D. J. sees the different positions as irreconcilable because he has reified the term "meaning" into being a "real thing in the world" which different factions have different hypotheses about. This is not the case. Rather, "meaning" is a handle with many senses, used by different people to describe different statuses of the text’s “signal” as it traverses the literary production-reception process. Each faction is led through the natural incentives of (social) discourse into over-emphasizing their sense of the handle as its "whole," its “essence,” the "true" sense of the term. So when Jameson says, for example, that intentionalism perceives “meaning” as singular, while poststructuralism sees it as indeterminate or multiplicitous, he misses that the sides are not arguing about the same meaning. There is no conflict in argument because there is no agreement on terms; the sides are talking past each other, as they have now for a hundred years. It is “meaning” in the sense of author intent that is singular, and “meaning” in the sense of reader interpretation that is multiplicitous, the original signal being "converted" or "decompressed" into different meanings by individuals with different interpretive schemas. To accept that there is a "singular" author-intended meaning is a claim in no actual conflict with the claim that there are "many" reader-interpreted meanings, and vice-versa.

While I happily concede that a great deal of work is being done by the “implicit” framing of the argument—that there is still “progress” happening among the confusions of what is essentially conceptual analysis—I do not think that a muddled explicit factoring of the debate leads anyone to clarity. Conceptual engineer “meaning” and be done with it. (I recommend “divide-and-conquer” over “narrow-and-conquer” for a plethora of reasons.)

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formerlyqueer · 4 years

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To What Do I Owe This Pleasure? A Self-reflection on Fantasy, Didion, and Failure

Dear Rodney,

I have known you for 21 years now, and I have to ask: why do you insist on living inside of fantasy? Do you have an avoidance for daily life, or are you simply dissatisfied, unenthused? Are you scared? What is it about the fantasy that feels exciting, and why do you do it knowing that you are going to inevitably be sad at the end? Sometimes I get tired of perpetuating the false worlds you create for yourself and I am growing increasingly tired of having to comfort you or kick while you’re down after the fantasy has fallen apart. I’m extending an invitation to examine.

Sincerely,

The very tired, sad, and increasingly lonely voice inside of your head

Dear The very tired, sad, and increasingly lonely voice inside of your head,

Allow me.

I’ve been sitting by the window a lot recently. Even now, as I write this (whatever the “this” may possibly be or amount to--I give you permission to decide), I have the window cracked; I leave it open for a better part of my days now, thinking about the short gusts of wind, and if perhaps, I am feeling the same wind as some foregone lover. “Foregone” sounds so dramatic and self-righteous, and I confess that it is, especially because most of those who are “foregone” lovers are not mutual (this is for another time that is just not here). Just outside, there’s a large radiator that hums on and off with little rhythm or logic, and around the radiator on the brick ledge just past my screen there are pigeons flying around. I think it’s nice. I’m neither bothered nor excited by it so much as I am curious. Why here? Is there something special about my window? Is it me? Is there perhaps an overwhelming energetic or even ancestral call to this space that the birds and I have fallen victim to? These questions seem to float around daily as it were. There--the radiator just clicked on. I wish someone was here to listen with me.

Given the surreptitious circumstances between the birds and myself, I was led back, somewhat heedlessly, to the famous opening words of Joan Didion’s 1979 seminal text, The White Album. Addressing, and most often directly embodying the increasing paranoia in California in the 1960’s, Didion writes the following:

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

I feel threatened and somehow found out by Didion’s address to herself and to her readers. For some probably neurotic and yet unsurprising reason, I take personally the very neutral observation that she has chosen to illuminate. Didion herself of course, is a writer, and by default, a teller of stories, so I can therefore carefully conjecture that she has no interest in pointing fingers or telling us that we are “wrong” for imbuing an often subconscious narrative to actually disparate events. I like to think that she is just saying.

The radiator, again.

I confront this quote by Didion because at this moment I feel an overwhelming amount of fear that has in turn yielded a daily dosage of dizzying self-awareness. I am fearful of the world at this particular moment. I am fearful of fleeing the small semblance of safety that my 600-square foot apartment provides, however, I am starting to grow increasingly fearful of staying inside all day. I am fearful of the overwhelming impulse to share my work on social media outlets to justify, somewhat vainly, my creative practice. I am fearful of narrative becoming an illusory fantasy because I know of its inevitability, and I know that it will abandon me, leaving me with remains of a few nonsense images that I chose to so duplicitously craft into a story. Despite my wishful attempts at crafting a narrative where I am pocketed effortlessly at the center, being visited by birds and serenaded by the illogical hum of a radiator, I fail. And so does my narrative--always and inevitably. It fails to remain, for it is too oscillatory, too in flux, and cannot hold onto one specific image. I burn inside the construction of my own narrative, watching as things fall apart. Surrounded by the ruins of straight men who are somehow gay, breezes of wind that are telepathically felt between me and some unknown lover, and birds who are unquestionably wise, I am left with nothing but the traces of my fantasy and an unwavering disappointment which can only be directed at myself.

On the off chance I look an inch beyond where I typically find myself, I am reminded that the birds use this space outside of my window to shit. It feels rather sad in the moment: being reminded that I am not at the center of some narrative, and in fact there was never quite a narrative to begin with. It was me, a few pigeons, a machine. A story was not a part of these occurrences; it was carefully crafted to provide some answers or some plentitude to an otherwise scarce moment of being. A story is never part of the moment. However, I took the bait of parsing down seemingly incongruous mundanities to construct a fantasy. The narrative fails me, or perhaps, I have failed the images.

I look at these swarming images as if they can be made into some palatable timeline. The attempt to even produce some linear logic of experience is futile and frustrating, and most of all, false. There is no absolute. There is no beginning. There is the swarm and the attempt to reason. Inside of the swarm we sit, bare naked, and exploited, we are faced with a choice. We know how this ends.

I have no interest in promoting the idea that we as humans are weak in our naiveté and stupid in our attempt to craft stories that “make sense.” In fact, I directly oppose this. I think it takes a tremendous amount of fortitude and grace to construct a moment. To create that which offers unto us and to others, a look into our being-ness, I believe, is actually an incredibly brave and selfless act. I am forced to remind myself that we are not simply ever representing, but we always just are. Our fantastical attempts at everyday narrative construction are not simply representative of the desire for storytelling as survival--they are survival. We are not producing facsimiles of experience, rather we are always implicated in the act of producing experience. Where the line between what is true and what is representation exists, I don’t know. I know however, that to engage in storytelling, in any capacity, is to survive, and it is perhaps not anything more than that.

What matters, I guess, is not the fact that I failed and failed myself at the construction of a story that I know will be endlessly fleeting from the present moment. What matters is that I did it, and I will continue to do it. I will continue to flirt with image as it arises daily to erect that fantastic monument which are in fact my deepest imaginings, desires, and fears. I will continue, despite being found out. The question of whether storytelling is good or bad feels wholly obsolete and is not the question that I wish to answer, or to even ask for that matter. Rather, I am much more interested in the fact that we continue to live inside carefully constructed stories despite having the knowledge that images always just are: they surround us, and perhaps that is all. Why is there such a firm insistence on crafting a moment that I know is too volatile, and too false, to hold forever? And why is it that in this falsehood I can allow myself to find such tremendous solace? And how can I be so self-aware of my neuroses and still let them run freely, unabashed, for at least a short moment?

We are not weak victims. We are not victims at all. We are, in fact, resilient beings who relish in the capability to make-sense. There is power to be witnessed in our constant willingness to fail. We can never find ourselves outside of the swarm. To see meaning in the void, the space where it cannot exist, is naive, but naiveté does not mean stupidity. If it did, there would be no necessity for both words. It is fun, and exciting, and sexy, and erotic, and human, and sad, and oftentimes it feels like the only reason I can stir up enough energy to pull myself out of my perpetually half-made bed. Even here, I wonder if I am conjecturing too much. I wonder if fantasy should be left alone so as to not rationalize its own magnitude but rather let it be self-actualizing. Should fantasy need to be justified? When do we give ourselves permission to create narrative and why do we need permission?

Birds will always shit. I will always crack any window I sit beside. I will always wish that I am not alone when I am. I will always want the moment that I am in to exceed the limits of what it can offer. I am perpetually dissatisfied. However, I realize in this dissatisfaction that there is more. Whether true or false, I, we, you, willingly decide to take what we are provided with and locate a fleeting moment of satisfaction in narrative; it is not just futile, or naive, it is survival. I think of Certeau--perhaps to create a narrative is to practice the writing of our moment; to be deeply invested in creating the world around us. We are charged with the potential to write and be writing as we are written. Maybe we owe ourselves and others the narrative, then.

As tragic as it seems, I am not a tragic hero. In fact, I am not even a hero. In fact, regarding both of the previous facts, I am not even tragic; nothing about life is tragic. It would seem reductive and vain to again regard this desire for some fantastically tragic event in my life as a neurotically narcissistic tendency, for I have known narcissists, and I like to believe that I am nothing like them. I don’t know why I try to find tragedy in things. Maybe I’m finding myself implicated in the process of meaning-making and in that I’m finding the irrefutably queer desires to be punished, to fail, and to craft, with such futile and fierce attempts, a fantasy of possibility where it is completely impossible. I don’t know if it’s sad, or beautiful, or both. I don’t even know if it’s either. I don’t even know if fantasy and narrative are the same anymore. Does one create the other? Are they always occurring together?

The radiator--you know.

I feel particularly ambivalent about this address. I don’t know what’s been accomplished. I think that even inside of this form I have told myself these digital utterances can somehow manifest into a story, when in fact, they are just symbols represented by some combination of zeros and ones. That realization, too, is starting to make me sad. Maybe it’s enough to live in the “more-ness” of fantasy and poeticism for a short period of time. What comes next, though? What will you, the very tired, sad, and increasingly lonely voice inside of you head, and I do next? Do we submit ourselves to locating satisfaction in what we know to be true, or do we continue searching for more, always? I wish to not exploit myself and others, the world around me, and the things that were not made for me, only for a brief moment of fantasy, but things feel dim right now. I think “exploitive” is a particularly pessimistic outlook, but I can’t seem to devise another way of orienting myself, so I’ll leave you with the following:

Halfway through writing this I decided to put on a paisley bandanna that masqueraded as a headscarf and a pair of prescription sunglasses. I sat next to the window, of course. I would love more than anything in this moment to tell you why I committed such an act, but unfortunately I cannot, and as for, you dear reader, I think you already know.

published on perphorm.org/blog on Sunday, April 21st, 2020

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celiottjohnston · 4 years

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Article: A Grandiose Unbelief

Author’s Note: The below article was penned prior to the global spread of the COVID-19 virus.

When paying close attention, bathroom reading at an interactive firm can turn up all sorts of interesting things. Take for instance the following closing quote from the compelling but conspicuously titled “Humans of Late Capitalism” meta-prologue Hot Right Now: A Contemporary Landscape for Digital Thinkers: Volume 2. “Now…” is an annual collection of thoughts and trends published by Awwwards Online SL, a design competition body that aims to “recognize the talent and effort of the best web designers, developers and agencies in the world.”:

Transhumanism & The Digital Messiah

There's much more to say about emerging technologies, social utopias and hallucination of beautiful and perverse futures. Despite all the disturbing examples about big corporations, airports scanning our faces, and the shocking birth of Lulu and Nana we should be optimistic. Ideas with the potential to change the world and improve our living conditions are appearing thick and fast.

Faith in technology is substituting religious beliefs. Now, not only God can give us immortality, or create other realities. Quantum physics, virtual reality or genetic modification can do it too. Transhumanism" [sic] has the prophetic vision to transcend the species beyond our biological destiny, to abandon forever the darkness of a world out of our control, previously guided by bibles and legends and protected by saints and shamans.

Considering the healthy amount of technical and philosophical nuance woven into this colorful HOLC authored (or inspired?) excerpt, I want to quickly restate its premise, using more straightforward language. Of course, it’s not lost on me that a simple restate is still a formidable task. This is because, in true Derridean fashion, most any position proposed by a metamodernity-steeped author can be abandoned when under scrutiny, with challenges dismissed as hot takes, understood out of context or humorous intent. Therefore, caveats and disclaimers aside, here is my interpretation of the excerpt:

Barring oft-discussed examples that threaten to capitalize on, privacy-invade, or genetically engineer our lives, many emerging technologies and scientific breakthroughs are generally beneficial to humanity and should be viewed as such. In fact, they, in their various practical and philosophical forms, promise a future unhinged from the burdens of mortality. A future where technology can play a central role as our collective evolutionary leverage point, propelling humanity into a state of godlike transcendence -- all apart from the oppressive traditions and liturgies of organized religious faith.

First, a Clarification

Before addressing the primary syllogism, I want to first state that it is not my intent to turn this criticism into a “gotcha” exercise, with the intent of identifying every technical, scientific, or logical false premise found in the preceding paragraphs. Much of the author’s content prior to this excerpt, as already mentioned, is compelling, and any reader interested in the current state of quantum physics, virtual reality, (or) genetic modification should study each of the advancements in each of these fields when considering the validity of the author’s broader assertions. I agree that the use of persistent government-sponsored surveillance, casual genetic modification, and tech monopoly-offered services (slyly marketed as convenience enhancers) is disturbing, and requires even further critical analysis. Furthermore I can also recognize the bold genius behind beneficial technology-driven advancements -- such as the groundbreaking work of Carbon Engineering or MarinaTex. Likewise with Kiva or Flikshop, whose tech infrastructure is focused on upending systematic injustice, or devices such as the Light Phone and Project Alias, that attempt to frost the open windows of our 21st Century lives. There is no doubt that these, like other similar innovations, stand as shining examples of human creativity, and enable human flourishing! But as inspired as these innovations are, I’m afraid that they don’t support the same grandiose vision, as the messiah-tech the author so eagerly promotes. It is against that attempt, to replant the tired old flag of human transcendence into religion, the oft referenced whipping boy of “rationalism”, that I make my argument.

Through a Glass Darkly

For starters, let’s touch on the fact that the author presupposes some kind of universally-grasped wisdom, with the power to illuminate a moral divide between “good” and “bad” technologies, while also basically pronouncing the irrelevance of religion -- arguably the origin point and catalyst behind all philosophical or moral discernment. Ignoring the fact that across the breadth of human experience, moral discernment has not been found to be the byproduct of a common sense dualism, buried deep in all of our cerebral cortexes and ready for action, but rather an outgrowth of the process of maturity, or put in the language of my faith, Sanctification. This maturity is a fuel for discernment not cultivated in the vacuum of egoistic pursuits, or in the ever changing mind of popular opinion, but instead, initiated by humility and refined in a crucible of wisdom, understanding, knowledge, and counsel -- also known as Aquianas’ four intellectual gifts of the Spirit. Instead, as is evidenced by popular examples, if moral discernment is sought outside of a framework grounded in the aforementioned wisdom, it is often bereft of substance, blown this way and that by the winds of cultural consensus.

The Roots of Truth

The author then attempts to reinforce this presupposed duality by contextually invoking the tired false dichotomy of technology (and by extension science) against religion, painting one as the Young Turk and the other as the incumbent Bourgeoisie. Contrary to this assumption, historians of science have addressed the so-called Conflict Thesis false dichotomy so often that they’ve in fact given their collective criticism of it an official title, the Conflict Myth. Rather, I would encourage the author to consider a third way: that science (in this case referenced under its engineered manifestation, technology) is not only critically informed by a robust understanding of humanity’s condition, ethics, morality, and frailty, but is also a direct offshoot of religion. As evidence for this assertion, I turn to Tolstoy’s great work of self-reflection, My Religion:

According to the doctrine of the Church, men have a right to happiness, and this happiness is not the result of their own efforts, but of external causes. This conception has become the base of science and philosophy. Religion, science, and public opinion all unite in telling us that the life we now live is bad, and at the same time they affirm that the doctrine which teaches us how we can succeed in ameliorating life by becoming better, is an impracticable doctrine. Religion says that the doctrine of Jesus, which provides a reasonable method for the improvement of life by our own efforts, is impracticable because Adam fell and the world was plunged into sin. Philosophy says that the doctrine of Jesus is impracticable because human life is developed according to laws that are independent of the human will. In other words, the conclusions of science and philosophy are exactly the same as the conclusion reached by religion in the dogmas of original sin and the redemption.

Utopia! Take 694!

But chiefly I’m stunned by the author’s ability to ignore the narrative of human nature as played out throughout history, by instead presenting a future unfettered by religion and tuned by transcendent posthumans as blissfully utopian. I contend that this reductionism, which in a roundabout way hopes to (once again) pin mankind’s depravity on oppressive religion, ignores the countless examples of man’s proclivity toward egoism, subjugation, and abuse. Whether we look to well known examples from religion, irreligion, politics, economics, scientism, philosophy, or individual examples any other human pursuit, all it takes to debunk said reductionism is a spoonful of personal honesty and a critical view of the evidence. A point that can be underlined most vigorously by a candid observation made by Einstein in his 1917 letter to friend Heinrich Zangger:

“All of our exalted technological progress, civilization for that matter, is comparable to an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal.”

If anything, the humorous observations behind the plotlines of WALL-E and Idiocracy tell a more reliable story of the future of technology-enabled mankind. Though sometimes capable of great good, humans, when left to their own devices, are base creatures, steeped in a selfish desire that even the most secular researchers claim to observe.

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Instead of entering into a virtual utopian ideal, I rather wonder if we would instead be inclined to becoming the despotic tyrants of the author’s “other realities” -- similarly to the primary antagonists in 2k’s Bioshock franchise of games, subjugating our silicon dreams to the horrors of the human condition?

#technology #religion #philosophy #cultural criticism #awwwards #theology

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scottadamsblog · 7 years

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Some Fake News About Me from Bloomberg

Last autumn, before the election, a writer for Bloomberg asked to spend a day with me to interview me for a feature piece about my blogging on Trump, and my life in general. I could tell from the initial conversation that it was going to be a hostile article. The reporter was open about being deeply frightened of Trump, believing him to be a racist, sexist, homophobic monster. So you can imagine how she felt about me for writing flattering blog posts about his persuasion talents.

I quickly determined that agreeing to the interview would be foolhardy. Obviously it was going to be a hit piece. The writer weakly tried to conceal that fact, but failed miserably.

If I agreed to the interview, I knew I would be making myself the target of ridicule and shame, baring my flaws to the world -- both the real ones and the fake news ones. No rational person would agree to such an interview. It was a suicide mission.

So I agreed to the interview.

Regular readers know I don’t experience embarrassment like normal people. I just thought it would be funny to have them write about how wrong I was. . . just as the election was about to prove how right I was.

The day I agreed to the interview, I told my girlfriend Kristina that I was going to be the subject of a “hit piece” in Bloomberg. When the writer asked to speak to my brother, for background, I told him it was a hit piece, but I invited him to do it anyway, just for fun. Obviously, no sane person would agree to be interviewed for hit piece on his own family.

So my brother agreed to the interview.

We’ll have a good laugh about it later today. He got framed as a gullible idiot for “believing” something my mom told us when we were kids.

Check the article here and see if you can spot the fake news and the places where context has been tweaked to make things look both true and misleading at the same time. I’ll tell you what you missed, if anything, after you read it. Compare your impressions to my Fake News Report Card below.

Here’s the Bloomberg article by Caroline Winter

Fake News Report Card

1. The article and headline used my old phrasing “master wizard” instead of the updated “Master Persuader” that I used in 95% of my work. That was an intentional choice by the editor to create the KKK association in your mind, or at least to make it all seem silly.

2. The anecdote about me showing her a Victoria’s Secret Whencast that I made didn’t happen. One of the hundreds of public Whencasts on the site included that content, created by a woman. I might have opened that one along with others as different examples of what the software can do. By highlighting that one bit of fake news (saying I created it), and putting it in the context of my girlfriend being too young for me, it created a powerful and intentional creepy vibe.

3. Kristina doesn’t live with me. She was staying at my house temporarily while her place was having some repairs and upgrades.

4. When an article is intended to be favorable, you see photos that make me look relatively good, like this one, from Peter Duke:

When an article wants you to look bad to the reader, you see photos like this, from the Bloomberg article:

This is standard practice on both sides of the political spectrum. Publications pick the photos that tell their bias, not the story.

5. The headline suggests I am somehow, maybe, in favor of genocide. Obviously I’m not in favor of genocide, and the article later weakly explains that. But by then, the damage is done. Your brain is most influenced by what you read first, especially if it is in a headline.

6. The headline says Trump hypnotized me. I would accept that as a hypothesis, but the article doesn’t address the point at all. The implication is that I’m a gullible nut-job, as opposed to one of the few people who predicted Trump’s win and provided lots of cognitive-science-backed reasons for the prediction.

7. The article was initiated before the election, and was originally intended for publication about then. But a funny thing happened that ruined everything for Bloomberg. Trump won, and in so doing, he made me look like less of a nut. My accurate predictions, against all odds, would have been the headline in any article that wasn’t designed to be hostile.

8. To explain my Linguistic Kill Shot idea, the writer focused on the Carly Fiorina “look at that face” incident. She could have mentioned Lyin’ Ted, or Low Energy Bush, or Crooked Hillary. All stronger examples, but they don’t make me look like a sexist when the context is omitted. The Fiorina examples does.

9. The writer refers to my wide field of interests as “unusual fixations,” thus turning ordinary discussions of fitness and diet habits into something that sounds like a fetish.

10. Last year, the author of a book about seduction called The Game mailed me a copy of his book. This is common practice among authors. Sometimes it happens because an author thinks another author would be interested in the book. Sometimes an author hopes to get a public mention to boost sales. I have lots of unread books all over the house for this same reason. The Bloomberg writer focused on this one. The Pre-suasion book she mentions was also signed and sent to me by the author, for the same reason. But I read that one. (It’s great.)

You might recognize this book-related persuasion trick as the Mein Kampf play. If someone gives you a book that you didn’t ask for, somehow the book still explains your soul.

11. The writer asked me what would happen for me personally if Trump won. I talked about the good and the bad of it. She picked only the following words to make me look like a douche bag: “If Trump gets elected, my profile will go through the roof, because I’m in a very small group of people who publicly said he would win in a landslide. ... I’ll be very popular,” he said, with satisfaction.”

Notice the three dots before “I’ll be very popular.” That is your signal for a manufactured quote. They assembled it from bits of what I said and left out the context that would have rendered it un-douche-baggy.

12. This quote is out of context: “In the kitchen, Adams installed three microwaves so he “can make a lot of popcorn at once.” The missing context is that I designed the house knowing that whoever makes the popcorn for the rest of the family misses the first part of the movie. Plus, the extra microwaves come in handy all the time. I use them at the same time quite often. How did that come out sounding nutty?

13. My girlfriend, Kristina, has an advanced degree from UC Berkeley, plays multiple instruments, has succeeded in several fields, and now has 3.3 million Instagram followers. The writer mentioned her bra size.

14. This quote was cobbled together to make me look like a racist and a sexist because I write about Trump. “Adams has said, his professional advancement was thwarted by diversity hires. ‘There was no hope for another generic white male to get promoted any time soon,’ he wrote in Dilbert 2.0: 20 Years of Dilbert. (Later in the book, he noted that his Dilbert TV show was canceled after ‘the network made a strategic decision to focus on shows with African-American actors.’)

Both events are true, but in the first case she left out the fact that my bosses told me in direct language that they couldn’t promote a white male. I didn’t imagine it. Likewise, the UPN network literally made the decision to focus on African-American viewers at that time. it wasn’t just my interpretation of events.

Here’s the problem with that sort of reporting out of context: I’m also the guy who thinks men should stay out of the abortion question and leave it to women to decide what should be legal. I also blogged about my ideas for slavery reparations. I also described myself to her as “ultra-liberal” on social issues, because I am. If you leave out that context, the anecdotes sound like an explanation for why I grew up to be so terrible.

15. The article quotes my friend and cartooning colleague Stephan Pastis as being appalled at my Trump support, and speculating that the reason might simply be that cartoonist crave attention.

Of course I crave attention. Plus, it’s my job. That part is not in dispute.

But I think Stephan’s quotes were from before Election Day, when people still thought I was nuts to predict a Trump win. Today, I think Stephan would add a second hypothesis: I did it because I thought I was right, and it seemed important to me to share with the world what I could see coming from a mile away.

Plus I crave attention. It was a twofer.

16. The writer badgered me on several occasions to make a comparison between Dogbert and Trump. I said Dogbert’s personality is based on my own dark inner thoughts and had nothing to do with Trump except they are both ambitious in the extreme. So she wrote this: “I’d thought the point of those strips was to laugh at Dogbert’s cruelty—not celebrate it. But Adams seemed elated by the triumph of a Dogbertesque president.” WTF?

That’s sixteen intentionally-biased or incorrect components in one story.

By the way, Bloomberg did have a third-party do fact-checking on the article by running a bunch of questions by me for verification. That is standard practice for the big publications. None of the things I mentioned here were in the fact checking. The fact-checkers don’t check the writer’s own eye-witness accounts for accuracy, and they don’t check for missing context.

When normal citizens read the news, they think it is mostly accurate. But when you are the subject of reporting, you can see the fake news all over it. I thought I would share this view with you so you can increase your skepticism when you see this sort of thing presented as truth.

Plus, I crave attention. I couldn’t solve healthcare funding without it, among other things. Attention is fun, but also a tool.

You might still wonder why I volunteered to be interviewed for a hit piece, aside from the attention thing. My brother just sent me a very short video clip of his first reaction when he opened the article to read it. I think this answers all of your questions.

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Update: An alert Twitter user sent me one of Caroline Winter’s 2015 articles. You might be wondering if all of her subjects get similar treatment.

You’re going to laugh when you connect the dots.

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You might enjoy my book because I crave attention.

I’m also on...

Twitter (includes Periscope): @scottadamssays

YouTube: At this link.

Instagram: ScottAdams925

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tessatechaitea · 7 years

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New Super-man #8

With an entire Bat-school full of Bat-men (Bat-mans?), Yang is probably going to turn Chinese Bat-man into Kenny from South Park.

I don't know if that's a better question. It's just a different way of answering it.

• Hmm. I probably didn't have to mention the bowel movement, did I? Because of the way I comment while I read the comic book, I tend to forget that this blog entry isn't going out live. • Back to the Kenan versus the ancient prophetic text made into a man, Kenan decides to move his qi up from his fists into his ears. That's so he can hear where Master I-Ching both is and is not. It's ancient Chinese wisdom. • Speaking of Ancient Chinese wisdom, has Archie McPhee never sold fortune cookies with Sun Tzu quotes in them? That seems like a bajillion dollar idea! Imagine opening a cookie after dinner and reading, "Invincibility lies in defense, the possibility of victory in the attack." That's already better advice than any regular fortune cookie I've ever eaten!

Although this one was pretty good. The Non-Certified Spouse's mother once got this one at a Chinese restaurant in Lincoln, Nebraska.

• Um, anyway, when Kenan moves his qi up into his ears, he begins to hear all of the noise all over the neighborhood around him. One of the things he hears is some kid bouncing a basketball. FUCK YES! That is one of my top hated sounds coming in through the walls of my house when I'm trying to write and I don't even have super-hearing! I just want to go outside, snatch the neighbor kid's basketball out of his sticky hands, and kick it over the roof onto the next block. The only reason I don't is I know that kid will soon be a teenager and he might stab me. • Wanna-Be-Bat-man of China loses the fight even though he conspired with Alpaca to rig the contest. So now he's decided to threaten the life of his schoolmaster by putting a Bat-Grapple up to his head. That seems wrong but I don't know anything about Schoolmaster O so I'll withhold my judgment. Schoolmaster O might be a huge prick. • It doesn't work. Baixi, Bat-man of China, saves the day and remains Bat-man of China. I wonder if there will be a Manbat of China? See how I left out the dash in the same way they've been putting in a dash for the Chinese versions without one? Clever! • I just wrote "clever" about something I just wrote. I also constantly call myself a Grandmaster Comic Book Reader. I wonder how many people are turned off by the seeming arrogance and completely miss the joke of it all? Dum-dums! • Once Kenan invokes his super-hearing, he hears a kid about to be hit by a truck and ditches the fight to save the day. But in saving the kid, the driver of the truck is grievously wounded. So he rushes him to hospital and heads off to pout at a nearby shrine. Master I-Ching catches up with him there. Probably to punch Kenan one more time and win the fight. • Alpaca winds up being Jiali, Bat-man's sister. She is tired of being controlled by China and all things communist. She's not even fighting for democracy! She's just an anarchist and my heart is suddenly pittering and pattering all over the place. Alpaca is the real hero! • Oh, also she escapes to be Bat-man of China's Jo-ker. But named Alpaca. • Master I-Ching doesn't punch Kenan in the nose and gloat and do a little blind man dance. Instead, he tells Kenan why Kenan has an octagon on his chest. And he explains Superman better than about 90% of all writers who have ever written Superman.

Never mind the third interpretation. It's not nearly as clever as the totality of this page.

• That previous page didn't make me cry but it has come closest to any comic I've read in a long time. It got me right in the belly trigram and the eye trigram. • After a moment of showing what everybody is doing during the Year of the Rooster celebration, there's an epilogue. Somebody identified as Super-man Zero, locked away in the Crab Shell, is approached by a mysterious figure who claims to be the reason for Chinese super-heroes. The final page identifies this mysterious stranger and...um...well, uh. See for yourselves!

Whew. I'm glad a genius grant Chinese American is tackling Ching Lung but I'm nervous about the comments I might make!

• I can't believe Ching Lung isn't in DC's late eighties Who's Who! They were trying to erase history, weren't they?! • Seriously, though, I'm super excited about Gene Luen Yang taking on this story. I'm a huge fan of people examining the racist history of popular entertainment, talking about it in a frank and honest way, rather than pretending it never existed. And I especially like when a company decides to tackle it in-house. I'm sure DC Comics had to be nervous about this whole thing but if they didn't kill the idea, I can only imagine Gene Luen Yang (who has been writing the fuck out of this comic book (that was a compliment!)) will have some insightful and thoughtful opinions on the subject of Yellow Peril characters. • Speaking of race in popular entertainment, I watched some thing on PBS last night with George Takei and Nichelle Nichols discussing Star Trek and how it was such major social commentary to have a diverse cast of characters in charge of the Enterprise. This made me reflect on watching the show as a kid. Something that was such a major issue when the show was produced in the sixties meant nothing to me in the late seventies or early eighties, whenever I began watching it. The diversity of the crew didn't have any kind of impact on me at all. That's encouraging, right? I know I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area which is probably the bubbliest bubble of all the bubbles (according to people who think embracing diversity and difference in others is somehow abnormal) so that's probably part of it. After school on KTVU, there were shorts produced by the television station between shows that showed non-white children living in the city that would end with the kid saying, "I'm proud to be a Chinese American!" Or "I'm proud to be a Black American!" Representation and diversity isn't just important for children who identify with the diverse characters in popular entertainment. It's also important for the white children to see that we're all a part of everything. We're all piloting the Enterprise to the future. Although what was meant to be a five year mission has gone ten times as long. Get it together, you non-bubbled bubbleheads. The Ranking! +2! It gets +1 for just being an overall well written book with great characters. It gets another +1 for the insight into Superman. Still my favorite comic book, beeyatches!

#New Super-man #DC Comics #Gene Luen Yang #Billy Tan #Haining #Gadson

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